Health Innovators You should Know About: How Elastabytes helped transform data storage across London NHS organisations
As part of an ongoing series that looks into the key health innovators across the UK helping health organisations engage with patients and transform the care continuum, Microsoft partner Elastabytes runs through some of the work they’ve been doing with a London NHS – Foundation Trust.
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At Elastabytes, we’re striving to enable innovation within the Health industry with our expert cloud infrastructure management services.
Earlier this year, we began working in partnership with an NHS Foundation Trust operating 3 hospitals and several clinics in London. With over 9,000 staff and over a million patients a year, they are one of the largest Trusts in the UK.
However, due to outdated on-premise servers, the Trust were unable to scale data storage and processes to their needs in peak usage time and when their data servers went down it often took days to resolve.
As a result, the Trust identified there was a real risk of data loss, resulting in an inability to book patients in or search for patient records. Furthermore, with lengthy infrastructure procurement negotiations projects were being constantly severely delayed, which stifled improvement and innovation within the Trust as a whole.
Elastabytes recognised this was a large-scale job to undertake and identified the most cost-effective first step for the Trust would be a migration of their servers to the Azure cloud. By implementing SQL Server as PaaS the Trust were able to reduce on-premises costs, as spending money on servers, power and air conditioning was no longer necessary.
Not only did this reduce costs but the Trust can now scale automatically so they are covered for maximum workloads. Scalability has meant the Trust is only using the resources that they require at any one moment, and vastly improved backup and restore routines mean that in the event of a server failure at the worst possible time, the Trust will be right back on track with no chance of data loss.
By moving to Azure the Trust were able to reduce the procurement cycle meaning they can move much quicker on projects, show return on investment (ROI) and innovate within a strict budget.
Being able to innovate quickly and know that your data is in safe hands means that projects can start on time, staff are empowered to deliver value and, above all, costs are kept under control. In real terms, moving to the cloud has really taken the pressure off a lot of our client’s already-strained employees. It has freed staff up from endless meetings about procurement and meeting budgets.
No longer are projects and productivity hindered by protracted processes. They are free to embrace new technologies far quicker to drive change, efficiency and reduce cost. As a result, the trust is now leveraging the new technology to provide life-changing innovations for patient care.
If you would like to hear more about this story, or find out how Elastabytes could help you revolutionise your SQL infrastructure with Azure, head to www.elastabytes.com or email info@elastabytes.com.
