UKFast receives supplier accreditation for HSCN

UKFast will support NHS services through the new Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) after receiving supplier accreditation from NHS Digital.

The Manchester-based company will provide cloud and hosting capabilities for NHS organisations via HSCN, which is due to replace the 15-year old N3 national healthcare network provided by BT.

HSCN connectivity will be delivered by a variety of suppliers, both centrally and locally. This includes Redcentric, which announced in January 2017 that it had been awarded a three-year contract to run the peer exchange for the network.

UKFast offers a variety of digital services including disaster recovery, software as a service (SaaS) products, cybersecurity and a cloud hosting range, eCloud.

Martin Knapp, head of UKFast public sector, said: “Modernising NHS connectivity is a hugely positive step. HSCN enables more organisations to interact and to provide high-quality, data-driven services to the NHS.

“eCloud is now connected to the wider digital health ring and we’re in a position to deliver hosting and cloud services directly to healthcare clients.”

HSCN went live with its first customer in October 2017. There are currently 13,500 NHS organisations using N3, which are required to migrate services to HSCN by August 2020.

Lawrence Jones, UKFast CEO, said the new network would enable NHS services to tap into new capabilities not currently supported by the ageing N3 infrastructure.

“We’re meeting people from NHS trusts who want to unlock new technologies like AI, big data and machine learning. We’re enabling them to do this by plugging in and accessing burstable cloud facilities at a moment’s notice, which is something they just can’t do on N3.

“HSCN is an incredibly exciting step for the UK healthcare community and we’re proud to support that development.”