Delivering early benefits whilst mitigating risk

Experience has suggested that one of the areas that prove fruitful when looking for early benefits when embarking on the cloud journey is that of the applications architecture. A full applications inventory and assessment will be required but by focusing on the priority clinical applications followed by the secondary clinical systems often uncovers significant opportunities for de-duplication, re-factoring to make cloud ready, embracing of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications or, most importantly, convergence of application services – as currently seen with EPR convergence as part of front line digitisation.

Convergence can also extend to the sharing of support desks, Trust Integration Engines (TIEs), patient portals and shared care records.

In priority order, each application is inventoried and assessed based on the requirements of the trust. The 4-step process involves:

1. Working with key stakeholders to agree the high-level cloud and hosting strategy. Cloud-first, where all new applications are cloud ready, may be stated as an aspiration for the trust as a whole. The use of vendor clouds, as in the case of EPRs for example, combined with the retention of legacy hosting for some critical applications may also be a principle in the strategy.

2. Each application, in order of priority, is inventoried and assessed as to their current disposition. For example: an application may require re-platforming owing to legacy platforms that are out of support. An application may be amenable to re-hosting in the cloud. There may be a significant security threat that must be addressed. The application might require significant re-factoring to make it suitable for cloud hosting. Or you may decide to rehost the application or, decide it can be retired because a new SaaS service is available or other application services mean this application is an unnecessary duplicate.

3. Once the assessment is complete, a detailed roadmap for migration can be developed. Here, the early wins can form the initial stages with subsequent migration being undertaken in appropriate phases to deliver benefits whilst minimising risk.

4. When embarking on the migration projects, each application is either moved to the cloud or retained on-premise according to the hybrid model agreed with the appropriate re-platforming, re-factoring or other actions implemented as required.

Whilst adopting an applications-first approach to cloud migration is an accepted line of attack, there are other approaches that can accelerate your journey to cloud which involve focusing on infrastructure first. Economic cases for an initial wholesale move to cloud prior to any transformation are proven and such approaches can be useful in addressing current pain-points such as storage needs, legacy data centres and assets that are at end-of-life, the move from a capital model of expenditure to that of capex and improvement in network infrastructure and security without the need for massive up-front investment and refresh of legacy estates.

Methods and tools are available which allow:

1. Quick assessment

Of the data centre server infrastructure and the economic case for moving to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for all candidate servers. This requires either good, reliable documentation of the data centre estate or, more probably, the use of discovery tools. Where the server estate is largely virtual-server based, tools such as RVTools allow quick and efficient dumps of data which can easily be used in profiling tools to assess the business case.

2. Cloud acceleration

Patterns documenting a range of hybrid cloud solutions derived from previous trust migrations can be used to reduce the time to value and introduce cost savings to healthcare providers.

3. Landing zone deployment and operations

ITO and managed services expertise can be leveraged to provide landing zone accelerators to facilitate automated environments for customer workloads. Secure, scalable, enterprise-grade and production-ready services can be setup in hours rather than days and weeks.

4. Cloud infrastructure management:

Provisioning of managed cloud services such as compute, storage, security and networks can be provisioned freeing up your valuable IT resources from mundane tasks and the challenge of managing hundreds of 3rd party vendors. Exit the data center business and empower your team to build transformational healthcare solutions.

5. Cloud security

Managed Security Services (MSS) can be enabled in cloud environments to enhance security from day 1.

By pursuing the hybrid cloud model the benefits of legacy optimisation, removing legacy obligation and the acceleration of your journey to cloud can deliver continuous cost reduction, risk and remediation mitigation and enable NHS England to deliver early clinical benefits on their digital journey's.

Working with integrators, some of whom will offer initial assessments for free, allow trusts to embark on cloud journeys with early benefits and continuous, self-financing cloud migration programmes.