The UK's National Health Service (NHS) England CIO John Quinn has urged NHS trusts to stop investing in data centers and move to the cloud.
Speaking at a conference for NHS IT leaders in Harrowgate last week, Quinn said: "If you have your own data centers and are about to invest further into them, I don’t think you should, you should buy the service from a cloud provider. This is low-value, high commodity stuff you shouldn’t do yourself. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle, they all do that at scale.”
As reported by Digital Health, Quinn added that NHSE could help aggregate demand from NHS trusts to negotiate larger nationwide deals with cloud computing providers.
According to Quinn, there is currently an issue across the NHS with "duplication of solutions" as well as fragmentation. NHSE is set to form a marketplace and innovation hub with TechUK to resolve some of these issues, which will launch in December 2024 and will be supported by Microsoft.
The hub is described by TechUK as a "cloud-based platform will be the go-to space for the NHS to share reusable solutions, foster collaboration, and accelerate innovation, all while reducing costs and eliminating duplication."
The NHS Shared Business Service won a spot on the G-Cloud 14 Framework Agreement - a national framework agreement for the provision of cloud services for public sector organizations - in November 2024. This aims to simplify the NHS's access to cloud-based solutions.
The National Health Service has long been migrating to the cloud, and in January 2024 it announced that it had decommissioned the data center previously hosting its NHS Spine system. This was aligned with the NHS' architecture principles which suggest that "digital services should be delivered from [or move to] the public cloud unless there is a reason not to do so."
In the past, AWS has won several NHS contracts, including from NHS Scotland and Track & Trace.
Towards the beginning of this year, the British Medical Association's (BMA) General Practitioners Committee called for a pause on NHS England's planned move to cloud-based telephony after costs began escalating - in some cases by as much as 470 percent.
Individual trusts and hospitals tend to operate their own data centers, with many having on-site deployments.
In October 2024, the UK's Northern Care Alliance trust revealed that it was looking to migrate to the cloud so as to reduce its need for a "considerable" data center.
