NHS trust embraces private cloud in £3m datacentre deal

Mersey Care NHS Trust is to replace its in-house server facilities with a private cloud platform that will be used to run the trust's medical applications. 

The £3m, five-year contract will see Mersey Care NHS Trust's operational data and ICT infrastructure migrate to SCC's OptimiseCloud platform over the next six months. 

Mersey Care NHS Trust is one of nine which use the Informatics Merseyside shared service. Informatics Merseyside signed a cloud framework agreement with SCC in May, allowing the nine North West trusts to access a range of secure services without the need for their own on-site datacentres. 

Informatics Merseyside is also forecasting Mersey Care NHS trust will see savings of 15 percent as a result of the move to the cloud.

"The cloud offers a robust infrastructure with transparency on cost and it obviously frees up resources to concentrate on clinical applications," Dympna Wilson, head of service delivery at North Mersey Health Informatics Service, told ZDNet.

As part of the deal with SCC, 15 TB of data currently stored on the trust's servers in Liverpool will be moved to SCC's £25m Birmingham-based datacentre in February. 

Back office applications and clinical systems will move to cloud hosting as part of the deal but other services, such email and telephony, will be added at some point in the future, said Wilson.