Neil Gibb advises on how practices can migrate to the cloud and explains what help is available
CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on NHS Digital
The benefits of migrating services from on-premise data centres to the cloud are clear; cloud-hosting is cost-effective, allows for greater speed, agility and scalability of services, improves security and creates more opportunities to adopt innovative solutions.
It also transfers the responsibility for installing, operating and maintaining infrastructure equipment to the cloud service provider. Most NHS organisations rely on a small IT team working an eight-hour day to ensure adequate operations cover is in place; large cloud providers have round-the-clock teams dedicated to this activity.
So, since there are so many benefits to migrating to the cloud, why hasn’t everybody already done it? The obstacles to migration differ between organisations, but a survey revealed that the three biggest barriers were:
challenges around the prioritisation of funding;
expertise (the capability and technical know-how around cloud operations);
the complexity of cloud, and how to navigate through it.
The Cloud Centre of Excellence at NHS Digital provides a central self-service and enablement function for the NHS. It helps other NHS organisations on their cloud migration journey by developing solutions and resources, promoting best practice and sharing knowledge across the health and care system. For those in need of further support, it also offer advice sessions. Here are some of the ways they can help.
Cloud strategy and assessment
While about half of NHS trusts surveyed had cloud migration incorporated into their wider digital strategy, those with a separate cloud strategy (18% of respondents) were actively migrating their services to the cloud. We encourage organisations to review the central NHS Cloud Strategy and adapt it to their own needs. There are also other strategy guides for the public sector available for use.
For those early on in their cloud migration journey we have produced guidance to help NHS organisations develop their own capability maturity assessments that will help to establish a starting point. The assessment evaluates the current state maturity of cloud implementation in an organisation and the desired target state from two key perspectives – technical and non-technical capabilities – which helps to identify where there is also a need for new skills in the organisation. There are recommended training and resources available from our partner organisations that NHS staff can access for free.
Migration planning
Next, it’s important to complete a workload migration assessment. This assesses IT services and workloads to determine what’s capable of being migrated to the cloud, and how. More specifically, it:
identifies the migration strategies that can be applied;
quantifies the effort, cost, dependencies and risks involved in executing migrations;
informs the overall migration strategy, roadmap and business case.
Business case and financial operations
Adopting cloud services requires a fundamental shift in the way IT costs are managed. Because cloud services are billed on a pay-as-you-go model, cloud costs are treated as operating costs – as opposed to the traditional capital expense and asset depreciation model. Additionally, the costs are variable and, therefore, can be difficult to forecast.
So, how can we help organisations make a case for change and secure the buy-in and budget needed? We offer guidance to organisations which are working through a business value assessment; this estimates the benefits which could be achieved by migrating existing platforms to the cloud. More specifically, the value assessment summarises the costs, potential savings, and soft benefits in a clear and concise format.
The key output of this service is a financial model for a first stage (top-down) business case for cloud migration. Organisations can then use this information to create their own detailed business cases. We provide standard templates and suggested narratives to use as a resource.
Other considerations
Before beginning the migration process there are a few more things organisations must consider; for example, there may be a need for enhanced information governance controls as data and systems are moved out of the ‘walled garden’ of on-premise corporate data centre.
Additionally, there may be a need to review and adapt organisations’ financial operating model when incorporating new cloud functions. We encourage best practice in this area using a financial operations model, and provide several services in this area such as cost optimisation reviews and billing reports, and we also proactively explore ways to reduce the purchase price of cloud services for the NHS by negotiating bulk purchasing discounts and savings plans with cloud service providers.
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