News - week commencing 19 May 2025

NHS England has recently completed a review of Spine Core and CIS Path To Live environment provision, in order to better focus environment support where demand from the supplier base was greatest and best supports quality health and social care IT delivery.

Review approach

Analysis of usage and trends, support costs and assessment of key use cases and options for their ongoing support. Evaluation of options re technical feasibility, central and supplier support, alignment with NHSE strategy.

Conclusion

The outcome of this analysis clearly showed that INT and DEP environments are widely used, whereas TRAIN and DEV environments are under utilised and the initial use cases justifying them no longer apply or can be supported in other ways. Therefore, INT and DEP environments will continue to be supported as currently, whilst TRAIN and DEV will move to a minimal support model before being decommissioned on 31 July 2025.

Implementation plan

Integration and Deployment environments

Support and build updates will continue as currently. 

Training environment

From 1 September 2024, the service desk will no longer create new users, endpoints or certificates. They will also no longer process certificate requests for existing endpoints. They will fix incidents however where a customer is experiencing issues.

Spine core and CIS will no longer be kept in line with Live builds.

Environment will be decommissioned on 31 July 2025.

Development environment

From 1 September 2024. The service desk will no longer create new users, endpoints or certificates except where a customer requires them for ERS related work. Certificate requests will also not be processed except for ERS related work. Incidents will be fixed as normal.

Spine core and CIS will no longer be kept in line with Live builds.

Environment will be decommissioned on 31 July 2025.

Benefits

A long lead time to decommission of the Training and Development environments will enable the supplier community to build replacement test collateral in the Integration and Deployment environments organically as use cases require. The reduced number of environments reduces complexity and improves build consistency and testing confidence.

In order to ensure joined up delivery, consistent standards and enable efficient support into the future, it is requested that all new customers and existing customers test in the Integration environment. This environment will be kept in line with Live and any new functionality will be deployed here also as per Live.

If you have any queries or concerns I relation to the above notice then please email [email protected]

To ensure sensitive authentication data is properly protected in line with National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) guidance and best practice we are taking measures to stop all use of deprecated versions of TLS. From Tuesday 27 May 2025, NHS England will block use of deprecated TLS v1.0  and TLS v1.1 for CIS1 authentication in all PTL environments.. Following this, from Tuesday 1 July 2025 NHS England will begin to implement similar protective measures for Live. 

You must take action to move to using TLS v1.3 and / or TLS v1.2 as soon as possible.

What do you need to do?

Ensure your organisation is using the latest NHS Identity Agent by identifying and updating machines using older versions.

If you need assistance moving away from TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 then please contact us as soon as possible via the ITOC Supportdesk below:

NHS England can help with any enquiries if necessary, but for the most part, it would simply mean upgrading the client’s Identity Agent as per advice above. Older versions of Identity Agent (including 2.3.2, which is common) will likely ‘negotiate up’ the TLS version, courtesy of the OS in use but we’d like to take the opportunity to recommend the latest IA version.