Part of Getting started with cloud adoption for NHS trusts
The cloud journey
The journey to cloud adoption starts with identifying your organisation's main drivers and goals. What efficiencies, innovations, or improved services do you aim to achieve? This clarity of purpose will guide your cloud strategy and is highlighted in the NHS England’s Cloud centre of Excellence 13 objectives when adopting cloud services.
These include:
- carry out an application and licence assessment to baseline where you are at the start of your journey
- understand security requirements, considerations, and best practices for hosting in the cloud and where you application data can be stored and processed. NCSC provides guidance on this which the NHS organisations should follow to ensure a secure and reduce threat landscape
- Understand hyper-scale cloud provider offerings and choose the right one to fit your product requirement not your organisations current overall need, one size does not fit all
- understand vendor lock-in and how to safely navigate an offering to provide a means to safely take advantage of a service and create a cloud provider exit strategy when new advanced services are available in the future
- understand when to use multi-cloud technologies effectively and efficiently and how this service will interop efficiently with other services within your NHS organisation
By the end of 2023, 25% of organisations will run over half of their applications in public cloud environment.
Next, fully understand what migration entails - the processes, timelines, costs, and resources required. Aim to transition applications and data incrementally, prioritising based on business needs. Start small with pilot migrations focused on non-critical systems. This allows you to build skills and experience before tackling more complex migrations.
Assemble a cloud-ready team to lead the transition. Provide training to build their technical expertise on cloud platforms, security, data governance and more. Leverage experienced consultants if required.
Develop a detailed roadmap for cloud adoption aligned to your priorities. Plan for integrating legacy and cloud environments during transition. Build in security, compliance, and governance from the start.
Evaluate operating models like hybrid cloud to gain flexibility. Review information governance policies to enable innovation while ensuring regulatory compliance.
The key is to start small, learn fast, and focus on business outcomes. With the right preparation and expertise, NHS organisations can migrate to the cloud in a phased, low-risk manner while delivering a fit-for-purpose service that generates benefits from day one. The journey requires commitment but the rewards are plentiful.
Last edited: 19 September 2024 11:04 am