Due to these issues, it had also become difficult for SATH to apportion the appropriate budget for maintenance and development of their digital platform. In the short-term, SATH wanted to understand the IT estate and to create a four-year plan for modernising the enterprise architecture. In the long-term, SATH aimed for a prioritised approach to uplifting the technology to ensure support, protect from cyber risks and enable the digital transformation of the patient journey. The ultimate goal was a digital transformation with a high quality and high performing ICT platform in networks, data centre and end user compute. In addition, the need to understand cyber risks was fundamental to assure the continuance of services regardless of external adverse attacks on the data platforms.
SCC provided consultancy to increase the capacity of remote working, enabled Microsoft Teams for communication and extended the availability of systems from campus to anywhere provision. The provision of laptops, monitors, headsets and webcams working in partnership with HP and other supply partners allowed devices and peripherals to be made available to ensure the hospital could provide for care of patients and safeguard administration and back-office staff.
In parallel, SCC conducted assessments of the Trust’s IT portfolio providing a risk and maturity assessment of cyber, data centre, enterprise platforms, workplace, network and software management.
SCC is working with the Trust to build its maturity in the cyber area. SCC has deployed an end-to-end cyber assessment tool that ensures the risks across medical and non medical devices is understood along with a prioritised plan to mitigate any risks. In addition, a new backup solution assures an immutable backup to protect against the damage of an attack.
A Trust wide upgrade of the wired and wireless network is in progress which will support the development of the digital plan to increase capacity, speed and availability for the forecast increase of network connected devices. The enterprise data centre platform is also being completed with the residual workloads being moved to the strategic solution residing on a modern software defined hyperconverged infrastructure.
SCC’s working relationship with SATH is based on a common set of facts underpinned by asset management of each solution part. Working as a single team, SCC is the strategic partner that leads the development of IT across SATH.