Reducing environmental impacts from ICT and digital

NHS Digital is a national digital service provider that recognises the environmental impacts of its ICT and digital services and operations. We operate a ‘cloud first’ strategy for our hosted services and have an appointed Sustainability Cross Cutting Concerns Representative within the membership of our Technical Review Group (TRG) to ensure sustainability architectural principles are considered and applied in line with the Tech Code Of Practice (TCOP).

We are continuously working with hosting suppliers to improve transparency of data and reporting.

NHS Digital’s continued push on the use of hyperscale cloud services, and cloud vendors driving efficiencies and increasing off-setting, enabled us to host more services on hyperscale cloud while still achieving carbon savings.

Our exit from the HM Land Registry data centre at the end of December 2021 and decision to move NHSmail from on premise to Office 365 in hyperscale cloud resulted in significant reductions in our ICT carbon footprint, which in 2021-22 was 1,024 MTCO₂e, a 38% reduction from 2020-2021 and 81% reduction from our 2013-14 baseline (data was unavailable for the 2017-18 baseline year).

NHS Digital remains committed to moving the services and applications it hosts from on-premises data centre arrangements to the cloud.