NHS Digital has struck a deal to act as service broker for the supply of VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to public sector organisations.
The national ICT partner for the NHS has set up a commercial framework - essentially involving a series of discounts - with the company for the provision of its virtualisation platform running on the AWS cloud.
VMware said this will enable it to provide economies of scale and encourage other organisations, notably within the NHS, to make their own move to cloud environments.
This comes as it is migrating workloads on VMware’s vSphere server virtualisation platform to the cloud. The move reflects its ‘cloud first’ approach that involves using multiple clouds.
The company says that VMware Cloud on AWS provides for consistent infrastructure and operations between data centres and the AWS cloud for VMware based workloads.
IT backbone
Rob Shaw, deputy chief executive of NHS Digital, said: “The uptake of digital services in the NHS is accelerating so the NHS and social care’s IT backbone must be up to the job. With VMware Cloud on AWS, we’re providing a resilient platform to support digitally enabled care today and in the future.
“We now have a commercial framework in place to enable NHS and public sector organisations to confidently use the cloud. Together we can benefit from the economies of scale and cost efficiencies of this model.”
The organisation’s association director of platforms and infrastructure, Michael Flintoff, said AWS provides the best option for running its vSphere based environments in the cloud.
“We built a virtual data centre in the AWS cloud in less than three hours,” he said. “That speed and agility is just what we need to harness innovation and make the best digital services available for the NHS and social care sector.”
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