Dedalus

In 2020, Dedalus took the decision to migrate from their UK Datacentre to the Healthcare Cloud, hosted on the AWS cloud platform. 56 healthcare solutions and 40 managed service customers had to be migrated to the cloud by the March 2022 deadline.

They successfully delivered a cloud migration deployment methodology that ensured minimum downtime and impact on its NHS customers, whilst ensuring security of data.

In addition, the Dedalus solutions had to be re-architected to be cloud certified. Dedalus have subsequently transitioned their delivery team to create a Cloud Centre of Excellence supporting customer migrations globally. The entire programme was successfully delivered within an 18 month programme of work.

Dedalus is one of the top 3 global healthcare software companies serving over 6,300 healthcare organisations worldwide. Dedalus have a range of healthcare solutions across systems of records, departmental systems, a unique digital platform and evolving systems of engagement. They provide a fully managed service to over 40 NHS customers, who were previously hosted within their UK Datacentre.

Dedalus recognise that for their customers to adapt with innovative technologies and stay up to date with changing regulations, having the option of a cloud hosted managed service solution is an essential requirement.

Enabling them as a managed service provider along with their healthcare provider customers to capitalise on larger amounts of virtual capacity than on premise or datacentre environments as well as allowing for a flexible approach to IT services and computing, ensuring both are operating in a more efficient and sustainable manner.

There is a clear strategy within the NHS for cloud adoption supported by the NHS England’s Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE) team, and Dedalus appreciate that whilst some organisations are equipped to complete a cloud migration, others may be considering a hybrid approach, whilst the remainder are not yet in a position to adopt a cloud strategy and are earlier in their journey. Dedalus fully support its customers in being able to provide all these solutions.

Dedalus's approach is to enable managed services to support customers to go public cloud first. They have the skills to execute the migration and provide a robust service post migration. They start with their own product sets, then work with the products their customers use from other vendors.

Dedalus had made significant investment in building, growing and supporting its datacentre environment and expanding it to provide more solutions to a wider number of customers. It had reached a point where significant further investment was required to create more scalability, upgrade some outdated technologies and meet the current cyber security requirements and a transition to Cloud was the logical ‘next step’.

They made a strategic decision to target the investment, providing a modern cloud hosted environment, which also inherently met these challenges whilst providing a platform to enable their customers to benefit from these targeted enhancements.

The flexibility the public cloud gives Dedalus can be passed on to their customers as shown by the speed of delivery of additional capacity with low-cost solutions.

Dedalus carried out significant technical preparation in advance of the cloud migration programme which involved: enhancing its existing solutions to be cloud compatible, generating a data migration solution capable of extracting the data from the existing system to be safely uploaded to the cloud and migrated into the enhanced solution.

They prepared for their customers independent migrations by collaborating to produce the relevant project initiation documentation, project and cutover plans.

Dedalus minimised the impact on each trust and their end users and ensured that the majority of the migration activities were undertaken by them.

The solutions were not re-architected and would have no impact on how they are used operationally and therefore each one of their NHS customers was only responsible for some “light touch” activities including:

• Firewall changes,
• desktop application or MSI deployment,
• data migration validation – record counts before and after the migration
• integration – TIE configuration and validation
• commercial changes – CCN to allow cloud provision for service
• UAT Testing of relevant areas – full regression test was NOT necessary
• dress rehearsal and cutover

Dedalus had a contract with NHS Digital (now known as NHS England) for a number of the solutions and they worked closely with them to alter that contract to support cloud supported solutions.

They worked with Dedalus to validate the design, cyber approach, performance engineering tests and this helped provide assurance to trusts on the NHS England contract and outside it

NHS England formed part of the communication plan for each successful migration project.

Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust EPR was the FOT migration that was successfully completed in December 2020. A lessons learned exercise was immediately carried out to look for opportunities to optimise the migration.

This involved changing their data migration strategy, converting to AWS Data Migration Service which led to significantly reduced downtime and continued to improve with every successful migration.

Dedalus' cloud migration team became more proficient with each migration and the experience the team gained was embedded into its current methodology. 

Thanks to the experience Dedalus gained during this programme they now have a proven, successful migration methodology and know the areas of focus during the initial migration discovery assessment.

• review of technical stack – operating system/ RAM etc
• review of operation – user access/ application communication
• network requirements – internet connectivity – IP addresses/ VPN etc
• SLA requirements – performance/ resilience/ availability etc
• sizing – capacity/ sizing/ users

We know that NHS England is encouraging NHS organisations with their digital transformation journey and by migrating to a cloud platform they can achieve the intended outcomes: a digitised health and care system with digitally recorded information flowing seamlessly and more easily accessible for all stakeholders, improved patient care and enabling patients to access healthcare services in a digital format, allowing them to receive care when and where they need it.

Cloud can support care organisations by providing digital solutions that are scalable, dynamic and secure. With reliable infrastructure scalable to handle significant volumes of data and traffic, providers can deliver more accessible digital healthcare services to a wider population.

Cloud services and solutions create opportunities to provide remote consultations, telemedicine and connected care solutions, empowering patients to manage their own health and reducing wait times for appointments, all of which are crucial in the post-pandemic era.

The cloud provides interoperability benefits which also allows NHS organisations to easily share information and connect with each other. Medical records being held in centralised, accessible yet secure virtual spaces enables faster access to vital information resulting in quicker diagnoses and better patient outcomes overall.