NHS Trust to put its data in the cloud

Cloud move will improve flexibility and save Trust 15% on IT spend

Mersey Care NHS Trust is planning to move its operational data and ICT infrastructure to a cloud platform as part of a contract that is expected to generate £1.5m in savings.

The project will see the Trust transfer 15 terabytes of data, currently stored in-house on 90 servers, to an external data centre. The transfer process will start in February and is expected to be complete by August 2013.

The £3m deal, which will establish the UK's first healthcare cloud, is set to run for five years. Although Informatics Merseyside, a central buying agency for nine local NHS bodies, signed the framework agreement with SCC in May, Mersey Care is the first customer to sign a contract.

Neil Smith, Director of Finance at Mersey Care Trust, said, "The business case for moving to a Cloud-based platform was compelling, offering significant savings over the alternative options we considered."

However, he added, "Budgetary issues are not the only factor behind the decision, as quality and security are as important to Mersey Care. The move to the cloud offers a number of benefits including a more flexible infrastructure capable of responding to the organisation's changing IT needs."

Mark Bostock, Director of Informatics Merseyside, said, "There are huge advantages to this scheme not only in terms of potential cost savings although the business case alone here is very compelling as this means there is no need to have multiple data centres and on-site servers."

"Additionally, customers can scale up or down very quickly according to their needs...if customers only want to do something on a short term basis they can as they only pay for what they use. This is a platform which provides massive flexibility and will undoubtedly see a much more efficient system."