Central and North West London NHS has shown there are significant advantages in a UK based hybrid cloud model, writes Rick Martire, director and general manager sovereign services at Rackspace Technology
There are common demands on the digital operations of all public services in the UK: issues around performance, efficiency, cyber security, value for money and, always at the top of the agenda, the experience of citizens and patients receiving services.
In the face of skills shortages sector-wide, organisations also need the space to innovate to meet rising demand, responding to an increasingly tech savvy public that now expects a smooth digital experience in using services.
This is where the concept of managed sovereign cloud provides huge potential, not just in reducing the skills requirement and time burdens, but in seamlessly combining public and private cloud options that meet the security and data sovereignty compliance needs of the UK public sector.
The CNWL experience
An example of what can be achieved was presented at the recent UKAuthority Powering Digital Public Services conference by Owen Powell, ICT director of the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL), describing its experience of working with Rackspace Technology.
CNWL is a large, complex organisation with almost 10,000 staff, providing mainly mental health and community services and operating well beyond the boundaries of London - to Milton Keynes, Surrey and beyond. Its digital delivery model involves in-house services managed by a team of around 60, including development and support of its SystmOne electronic patient record; and outsourced services for cloud storage, network management, telephony and service. This is all knitted together in a service integration and management (SIAM) model, with no servers at all on premise.
Powell said it is a knowledge based model that can respond to evolving business relationships, with all the “heavy lifting” digital elements outsourced, and described how it has been made possible through Rackspace Technology and its hybrid public and UK-based private cloud, Sovereign Services.
CNWL entered a partnership with the company in 2019 – an agreement that was renewed in 2024 – and migrated 375TB of data and its applications to the cloud services over nine months, since when there has been close to continual 100% availability.
This has freed the IT team from routine tasks such as data centre maintenance, spinning up new servers, and managing disk capacity, back-ups, single points of failure and uninterruptible power supplies. It enables them to take advantage of public cloud where appropriate and secure sensitive data in the UK.
Crucially, it has also reduced the pressures in retaining technical talent – a continual problem with the limits on salaries in the public sector.
Focus on ambitions
This has made it possible to focus on expanding its ambitions, with initiatives such as optimisation of the electronic patient record to include clinical pathways and information sharing, and the development of a unified communications strategy, which should make it easier for service users to contact the trust and simplify internal communications and workloads.
There are also efforts to build up the business intelligence capacity through a joint procurement with two other trusts – which would be supported by the ability of the hybrid cloud to support common platforms – and to use ambient voice technology to save clinicians the time spent in writing up notes from consultations. Another project involves the use of CoPilot to support patient triage through classifying risk factors to support decisions on who should be seen first.
Powell said the hybrid cloud enables the trust to focus on the business rather than the technology, and that the experience of the past six years has built positive perceptions of the move to cloud among the trust’s senior officials.
“Initially there was a lot of focus on our cloud solution and concern among execs about lack of control and not being able to see the servers,” he said. “But after six years I’d say that cloud is firmly established in CNWL and the senior stakeholders have confidence in the solutions it provides.”
He added: “The whole point of this is continued commitment to high quality services. We’ve worked out this platform based model has allowed us to do the things we need to do to deliver great services to our clinicians and nurses, and for them to provide better services to our patients.”
Dedicated pods
The Rackspace Sovereign Services suite includes four ‘pods’ dedicated to different sectors: government, healthcare, police and commercial. They are all operated as ITIL compliant managed services within the UK and in separate computing and storage stacks, each providing options for public and private cloud platforms, and with multiple separate security domains and solutions that are compliant with best practice.
Its private cloud offerings are hosted in Ark data centres and public cloud on platforms including Azure, which provides great scope to develop hybrid models. All have security accreditations for BSI 27001, 27017 and 27018, Cyber Essentials Plus and for the Public Services Network, and are compliant with guidance from the National Cyber Security Centre and the bodies relevant to their own sectors.
Also, they are offered as-a-service on standard units of charge, so organisations only pay for what they need, which can be scaled up or down depending on the services to be supported.
They can support a range of use cases, including the hosting of digital platforms, data centre consolidation, the integration of community networks and workloads for AI and machine learning.
Space for innovation
This all provides the scope for organisations to reduce complexity and costs in their services, ensure security and regulatory compliance, future proof their operations and, crucially, find the space for innovation. It can free up public sector bodies from dealing with the ‘boring’ parts of IT, keeping their platforms within UK borders, saving on costs, being able to increase and reduce their capacity as needed and being able to focus on the citizen experience.
Rackspace Technology can help you accelerate your innovation while reducing your costs and looking at the wider, secure picture in which innovation takes place.
Rackspace Sovereign Services can provide you with everything you need to source, deploy, and manage secure and compliant cloud IaaS workloads that meet the specific needs of UK government, healthcare and law enforcement, click here to find out more.
You can also hear more from Owen Powell below about the Trust's journey to cloud and its ambitions for the future in his presentation to Powering Digital Public Services, and explore how Sovereign Services can help you build a reliable, secure and efficient foundation for innovation in my own presentation at the event. You can also catch up with the insightful panel discussion that morning featuring Owen, myself, Karl Hoods from DSIT / DESNZ and Stephen Koch from NHS England:
