Case Study: Surrey And Borders NHS Trust Embraces The Cloud

The Surrey and Borders Healthcare Foundation Trust is responsible for the provision of mental healthcare for all ages in Surrey and its surrounding areas.

The Trust’s employees often work within the community to provide round the clock care due to the nature and scale of their work, which often involves vulnerable and isolated citizens.

Immediate IT support and access to Surrey’s own system and the national N3 medical record system are critical in ensuring staff are able to do their jobs.

The Business Problem

The Trust was facing an issue when it came to giving staff the critical IT access they required to help everyone in need in the community – it only had an 11-man IT support team to manage its hugely diverse environment, spread over 800 square miles.

A more comprehensive and scalable remote IT support system was required to help aid the increase of mobile workers in the last two years.

Surrey was also aiming to reduce its number of permanent offices from 70 to less than 30.

“A good proportion of our community services staff work remotely. So previously if something went wrong or needed updating a member of staff would need to wait until they were next at a network-connected site and one of our engineers was available to look at the problem and resolve it,” said James Devereux, technical support team leader at Surrey and Borders.

“Any specialist issues also needed to be allocated to the right member of my team, that process could take anything between three hours and three days to happen, that just wasn’t sustainable,” he added.

Solving The Problem

The Trust decided to work with CentraStage, a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud provider to help it tackle the issues it was facing.

The firm implemented its cloud-based platform in August 2012 with the aim of supporting the entire IT environment.

According to CentraStage CEO Christian Nagele, its cloud solution is the fast and affordable remote support system that the Trust required to allow its staff to perform at their highest standard.

“As CentraStage is cloud-based, it has allowed us to deliver an ICT system to the team at Surrey and Borders that is flexible and responsive,” claimed Nagele.

“We are already seeing growing evidence of the current government adopting cloud computing as a way of delivering their computing resources and I’m delighted they are following the lead of forward-thinking organisations like the Surrey and Borders Foundation Trust,” he added.

The Results

The CentraStage solution has allowed Surrey and Borders to vastly increase reliability across its large scale network.

“CentraStage’s cloud-based platform ensures my team can keep our IT systems online and secure,” said Devereux.

“Rolling out CentraStage across the Trust’s entire IT estate has meant that our staff can rely on their laptops, tablets, mobile phones and our back end servers when they are out on the road,” he added.

The team leader also praised CentraStage for its remote management and monitoring function which has enabled the Trust to fix any issues that do arise as quickly as possible.

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