Rackspace Technology migrated Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL)’s IT services to a private cloud environment, allowing for 10-times more staff to provide essential health services remotely ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic.
CNWL is one of the largest NHS Trusts in the UK, providing integrated healthcare to a third of London’s population and the south of England with more than 300 different health services across 150 sites, as well as offering services to customers overseas.
The first priority for Rackspace Technology was the transition of CNWL’s key infrastructure onto the cloud in VMware RPC-V, a resilient solution deployed in two data centres, as well as secure managed services. The project was under a strict deadline which was successfully met through the help of Rackspace Technology professional services consultants.
The new infrastructure was implemented to allow many of CNWL’s services to be offered in other ways rather than face to face, with more than 2,000 concurrent home users all reliant on cloud technology.
The lockdown has proved useful as a testbed for CNWL to identify how new technological solutions can support it in providing its core services. In particular, certain more personal or sensitive healthcare areas, such as sexual health, could see a long-term move to offer more online solutions, retaining the discretion many patients desire far more easily than in-person visits.
Rackspace Technology’s work with CNWL has brought a clearer and more understandable model for costs. The cost transparency affords CNWL with cost optimisation, allowing the organisation to only pay for services it needs at any given time.
“I don’t think we’d have managed to function if we hadn’t worked with Rackspace Technology,” said Owen Powell, ICT Director at CNWL. “Most of what we do is on-premise, in-person healthcare so while a few people might work from home throughout the week, we have not generally operated remotely because we’ve never had to.
“We’ve made some great advances in how we interact with patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, including online tests and prescriptions as well as demos and consults over video calls. By any standards, this has been an enormous upheaval, but there was never any issue with scaling to our new requirements with Rackspace Technology and our operations were, from a technological standpoint, unaffected by the lockdown, which is remarkable.”
“While exceptional times call for extraordinary efforts, at Rackspace Technology we have long been committed to providing our Fanatical Experience,” said Tim Lovejoy, VP Private Cloud and Government at Rackspace Technology EMEA. “To have been able to support CNWL as it served its community at such a vital time was very important to us and we look forward to continuing to do so, and to our future plans as a partnership. This project has allowed us to demonstrate the cost, technical and expertise benefits of our partnership for public sector organisations.”
The next steps for the project are to continue the transition from server-based legacy systems and onto private cloud services, as well as exploring the potential to move to a multicloud model by leveraging public cloud. Using Rackspace Technology as a broker for public cloud will present an additional opportunity to reduce costs as CNWL continues to move towards its desired model.
