NHS North East London Commissioning Support Unit

Challenges

North East London Commissioning Support Unit (NEL CSU) were running a transformation project to migrate workloads from five local data centres to a single new facility and Microsoft Azure, in addition to protecting the data across their London GP surgeries.

As part of this project, NEL wanted to engage a provider who could provide a backup solution to protect the critical services migrating to their new data centre. This consisted of approximately 260 Virtual Servers and 165TB of application and file data.

There were a number of key requirements:

1. The solution needed to support physical and virtual servers and application-level protection for several key applications
2. Backup operations needed to complete within strict backup windows
3. The CSU had limited in-house resource for deployment or management of the backups
4. Onsite local appliances were required for rapid backup and recovery operations plus replicated immutable cloud copies to comply with NCSC best practice and to protect against cyber attack
5. The service provider needed to be flexible and agile to meet changing needs during the transformation project

General Practitioner Data

In addition to the data centre requirements the service also needed to protect General Practice data for up to 3,000 servers across 1,350 GPs; replacing the local tape or disk solutions which were coming to the end of their life.

The main challenges around GP data protection were:

1. The backup needed to be direct to cloud to minimise the need for local infrastructure and associated costs
2. The solution needed to support backup over relatively low bandwidth
3. Hands off for the CSU so that they could focus their time on other projects
4. Cloud storage in highly secure UK-based facilities to meet NHS Digital requirements
5. Data had to be replicated for redundancy to meet NCSC best practice
6. The solution needed to protect and enable recovery in the event of a cyber-attack
7. The solution needed to meet NHS Digital compliance requirements

Solution

After reviewing all of the leading technologies in the marketplace, NEL selected ORIIUM’s cloud hosted fully managed Backup as a Service (BaaS).

ORIIUM’s technical team worked closely with NEL to understand the technical infrastructure in detail and the digital transformation programme’s timelines. This gave an understanding of the BaaS service needed to integrate with the project to ensure that workloads were protected as soon as they were transitioned to the new data centre.

In the data centre the design included a highly resilient local appliance complemented by replicated air gapped data copies in the ORIIUM cloud. For the GPs part of the project, ORIIUM implemented a direct-to-ORIIUM-cloud BaaS configuration. This provided low overheads, was cost-effective and delivered reliable off-site data backups.

Because the services are fully managed from solution design and implementation to day-to-day backup operations and data recovery, both NEL CSU and the GPs benefitted from a 24/7 monitored and managed service. This solved the problem of the lack of internal resources by enabling the staff to be hands-off with backups.

The service provides several immutability controls to protect critical data against the threat of ransomware, in addition to virtual air gapped cloud data copies to ensure the data remains accessible and can be recovered in the event of an attack.

Other Key Elements of the Service:

• To provide detailed consumption and service visibility to the CCG’s, ORIIUM implemented multi-tenant reporting and management capabilities, providing detailed insights for billing and service quality monitoring
• Scalable on demand cloud service to accommodate future growth
• Being a trusted strategic partner for data management to provide ongoing advice as requirements develop
• Assistance with decommissioning the legacy systems from the closing data centres
• NEL CSU also needed a provider who would pass all the compliance requirements for handling sensitive data; as ISO27001, Cyber Essentials Plus, and NHS Digital Data Security and Information Protection Toolkit Certified, ORIIUM met and surpassed these requirements