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There was new evidence of the NHS’ growing willingness to accept cloud-based solutions last week with news that Mersey Care NHS Trust has signed a five-year contract with SCC. The move will see the Trust migrate its operational data and ICT infrastructure to SCC’s 'OptimiseCloud' platform over the next six months. That means the Trust is moving 15 terabytes of data from its 90 in-house servers to ‘the cloud’.
It’s clear that cost savings were the major driver for Mersey Care – the Trust’s FD Neil Smith said the business case for moving to a cloud-based platform was ‘compelling’. But flexibility was also a key factor in the Trust’s decision. Smith highlighted the ability to scale up or scale down the infrastructure according to their needs as a benefit, freeing up resources for application development and service delivery projects.
As we said in our recent UK Healthcare SITS Market Trends and Forecasts report, we expect more cash-strapped NHS Trusts to steadily follow Mersey Care’s lead ‘into the cloud’ in the months ahead.
