‘The cloud’ is one of those buzzy phrases surrounding IT infrastructure, the kind that mostly come round every now and again and dominate the conversation before buzzing off again. That’s unlikely to be the case with the cloud though, as it has a longevity which makes it ideal for the NHS and other public sector enterprises in the brave, new, post-pandemic world.
Migration to the cloud from fixed servers is nothing to be scared or worried about, as we’ll see.
Delegating responsibility
Principally, migrating to the cloud lets you hand the worry about disaster recovery and practically all other security concerns over to the company which hosts your cloud solution. For example, Microsoft Azure allows you to specify that your data is held on a server located in the UK when GDPR is a consideration, as it would be with patient data in the NHS. If that server develops an issue, you can request that the data is transferred to another UK server and never held on the continent. You can always be GDPR-compliant with the cloud.
Similarly, using Microsoft Azure as a cloud solution means that the responsibility for power, server redundancy and connectivity all lie with the host company. In the old days, hardware would be bought by an NHS trust and installed in the dusty basement of a hospital or doctor’s surgery. If the system was running slowly, it would be the IT manager’s responsibility to give it more power or add more capacity. With Azure, all it takes to do that is a phone call to the host.
When is a migration not a migration?
While some advantages of the cloud are the same regardless of whether the organisation using it is in the public or the private sector, remote servers have distinct plus points over fixed servers when it comes to the NHS.
The applications and services that keep our hospitals running are far bigger than those in the private sector. Despite this, NHS IT managers have not always completed full migrations in the past. They have been taking their servers off-site but moving them to privatised data centres, which is simply shifting a problem to another location rather than solving it. If these other servers do not have multiple failure points, backup generators or other necessary resources, the move will have been futile.
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A move to Azure is a full and complete transition to the cloud. Microsoft has invested huge sums to make sure that vital data is available from its servers when it is needed.
Consider the endpoint
If you’re an IT security manager in need of a solution but with a limited budget, it might be worth switching focus from servers and instead taking a look at the status of endpoints.
An endpoint is a state where a user’s desktop on which they complete their tasks every day is accessed through a web browser. As such, the pane of glass that is in front of them on their desk – or their kitchen table, if they’re working remotely and flexibly, as so many are demanding the ability to do these days – is largely irrelevant. This is a definite advantage in the public sector and the NHS, where every penny spent is scrutinised, because older hardware can still be used without the need to outlay on new technology. A migration to the Cloud can therefore create the twin benefit of a more secure environment with lower associated costs.
In the NHS, using endpoints and Azure allows for connections to the colossal system that is the backbone of the service, appropriately called NHS Spine, which joins together 23,000 healthcare systems. Patient services and records can be accessed remotely, which allows for the flexible working that is the latest trend in the employment market and which, since the dark days of the pandemic, has also been identified by NHS managers as being beneficial to the service as a whole as it attracts talent and stops the spread of Covid-19 and any other airborne viruses.
Using endpoints in this way isn’t just for NHS lifers who have spent their entire careers with the service; it also allows new users to be set up with all they need for their jobs easily and comparatively cheaply. Furthermore, the additional need for complicated endpoint protection is completely negated as the endpoint in this case – the user’s computer – doesn’t contain anything of interest to hackers intent on harvesting patient data. All the juicy detail is stored in the cloud rather than on that ten-year-old laptop.
Lee Wrall is director and co-founder of Everything Tech
