Cloud services played a crucial role in enabling Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust to carry on working when the Covid-19 lockdown began.
Owen Powell, the trust’s ICT director, says it immediately had to deal with a surge in the number of people working from, with the number accessing its systems remotely rising from 200 to 2,000 concurrent at the peaks. It had to enable them to work from anywhere with an internet connection, enabling them to seamlessly access systems and files to continue their jobs.
“Cloud was fundamental,” Powell says, highlighting the contribution of strategic technology partners Rackspace in hosting and Daisy in providing support for networking and remote access. “They worked amazingly well. Everyone recognised NHS was in a challenging position; we were right at the sharp edge with Covid and everyone pulled together.”
This has provided a shift in the long term outlook for how organisations such as Central and North West London NHS Trust, and it is looking at how it can use technology to transform its operations, with a lot more people working more often from home, and new ways of communicating remotely with patients. It sees cloud as a central element of this, also providing the scope for greater automation and data analytics.
Listen to Owen Powell explain in more detail how the trust is responding to the challenges thrown up by the pandemic and using the lessons to inform its thinking on the long term outlook.
Owen recently participated in an episode to UKA Live: Managing digital complexity in a pandemic. You can view the episode here or download the associated briefing note below
UKAuthority and Rackspace have worked together on a new report, Managing Digital Complexity in a crisis, that explores further some of the themes in this webcast. You can register to receive the report below.
You can also download a pdf here of the UKAuthority and Rackspace report from earlier this year 'Smart Sourcing Insight'
