“Through the transformational activity, Daisy has proven themselves to be a strong and determined partner helping the Trust achieve its objectives.”
– Tina Giles, Director of Technology at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
The Trust provides care in a range of locations, including people’s own homes, specialist clinics, hospitals, low and medium secure units, and GP surgeries. As a member of the University Hospital Association, it is recognised for its strengths in research and education. It is also part of the Sussex Health and Care Partnership, working together with other organisations to continually improve services for the local communities that surround it.
The Challenge
To meet the ongoing sector targets for increased operational efficiency, balanced with cost savings, the Trust was looking to operate in a more agile way. They wanted to be able to increase and decrease (flex) their compute resources and associated charges to meet organisational needs.
To do this, they needed to transform from an existing legacy dedicated compute environment into a cloud service. This meant undertaking a full migration to a new domain, utilising the EA Microsoft licenses they had procured previously. Most of the estate also required operating system upgrades as part of any transformation activity.
The Trust needed to find a solution that delivered this transformation, allowed for the flexibility to scale to meet future demands for servers (virtual machines) and storage and ensured high availability within the core solution without going over budget.
The Solution
Through several complex workshops, the entire estate of more than 300 servers was reviewed and reclassified to either be re-hosted, rebuilt, re-architected, or decommissioned. The level of resilience required for each workload was also assessed.
After this review, options for public cloud (Microsoft Azure), community cloud (Daisy Flex), and private cloud were assessed and commercially validated.
The joint conclusion was to move to the community cloud via Daisy’s Flex 2 solution to deliver against the licensing, scalability, availability, and budgetary requirements of the Trust. Delivered via a hosted, managed services solution, the Trust’s core compute infrastructure of servers (AKA its “crown jewels”) was transformed into Daisy’s community cloud split 50/50 between its sites. This approach was taken as risk mitigation so that in the unlikely event of catastrophic failure, only 50% of the Trust’s critical data would need to be transferred to and run from an alternate location. To facilitate the decommissioning process, an interim transitional platform was also provided for the initial nine months of the contracted period to mitigate any issues such as outages.
The Trust’s existing unified communications (UC) platform was also transformed and upgraded onto the Flex2 platform due to the end of the serviceable life of the old, dedicated environment. The Mobile services were also renewed.
The Result
Through an ongoing partnership with Daisy, the Trust has achieved its stated aims of agility in the delivery of its core compute, ensuring flexibility, scalability, and resilience without compromising on security. This had the added advantage of being able to utilise existing licensing and ensure that its commercial goals could also be achieved and managed effectively going forwards – all without the risks associated with pure-play consumption-based services.
Going forwards, the Trust is working with Daisy on transforming their means of communicating with both staff and patients. The goal is to maximise the possibilities and functionalities of business communications platforms, and transfer phone systems away from traditional PSTN lines and onto internet-based alternatives ahead of the PSTN switch-off in 2025.
