Brighton moves into cloud with Microsoft

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is deploying Microsoft’s Hyper- V private cloud platform to deliver unified communication and collaboration across its IT estate.

The move will see the trust depart from its existing shared service model to a private cloud-based approach.

It will also support an ambitious IT strategy to secure foundation status and its position in the local health economy, as part of which it is also planning to implement an electronic patient record from Portuguese company Alert.

The trust said moving to the cloud would enable it to deliver applications as services, increase application uptime, and better resolve problems.

Chief information officer Ian Arbuthnot said: “We needed to update our physical infrastructure, improve connectivity uptime as well as run and deploy apps more effectively.

“All in all, it was time to move away from the inefficiencies we were seeing in the shared service model to an innovative and forward looking service, that would ensure a stable and efficient IT platform.”

The trust is using a range of Microsoft technologies including Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and System Center. It will extend its use of the Windows 7 operating system and roll out Lync, Microsoft’s next generation communication server to its PCs and tablets.

“With Hyper-V, we’ll be able to implement our server virtualisation with ease and are confident that we will benefit from economies of scale with regards to the number of machines we virtualise,” Arbuthnot said.

“We [will also be able to] deploy a comprehensive private cloud that will deliver the control and agility essential to the trust.”

Arbuthnot said cloud was a core IT infrastructure consideration nowadays and critical to consider as part of an overall business strategy. The project is being delivered by OCSL, a Microsoft Virtualisation and Management Partner.