Part of Infrastructure hosting standards for the NHS
Hosting architecture and resilience
Standards you should meet on hosting design, resilience, availability, and architectural best practice.
1. NHS organisations should ensure hosting solutions have resilient designs
Importance of meeting the standard
Many digital services in the NHS are reliant on hosting infrastructure for safe clinical care and operational continuity. Architectural weaknesses, such as single points of failure, increase the risk of outages, degraded performance, and patient safety impacts. Resilient hosting designs ensure systems remain available when faults occur and support safe recovery during incidents.
When to meet the standard
- designing, deploying or upgrading hosting environments
- implementing new clinical or operational systems with high availability needs
- addressing issues identified through incident reviews or risk assessments
- consolidating services or moving from legacy hosting platforms
How to meet the standard
- hosting designs incorporate redundancy for critical components (compute, storage, power, network, cooling)
- failover paths are in place, tested and documented
- workloads are placed in resilient hosting environments appropriate for their criticality
- resilience measures form part of business continuity and disaster recovery planning
- hosting configurations are reviewed regularly to ensure they remain fit for purpose
- critical services should use redundant compute nodes, failover clusters or equivalent technologies
- storage should support resilience features appropriate to need (for example RAID, synchronous/asynchronous replication)
- network connectivity should include diverse paths and redundant switching where risk requires it
- logical and physical separation should be used to reduce shared failure domains
2. NHS organisations should ensure hosting architectures support high availability and have clear, documented dependencies and failover paths
Importance of meeting the standard
Digital services in the NHS rely on continuous availability to support safe clinical care. High availability (HA) refers to a system’s ability to remain operational and accessible for a very high percentage of time, supporting continuous service. High‑availability hosting designs reduce downtime, but are only effective when system architecture, dependencies and failover behaviour are well understood.
Without clear documentation, incidents and changes can introduce unexpected impacts, delay recovery and increase patient safety risk. Combining resilient design with accurate architectural understanding supports safer operation, faster recovery and more confident decision‑making.
When to meet the standard
- deploying systems used in direct patient care
- designing or upgrading hosting environments
- migrating to new platforms or architectures
- replacing end‑of‑life or unsupported hosting solutions
- reviewing resilience following an incident or assurance activity.
How to meet the standard
- critical systems are deployed using high‑availability design patterns appropriate to clinical risk
- redundancy and failover mechanisms are implemented, understood and regularly tested
- hosting architectures clearly document key components and dependencies
- failover paths and recovery behaviour are documented and accessible
- maintenance, patching and upgrades can be performed without service interruption where possible
- architecture documentation is reviewed and updated following material change
- HA mechanisms may include clustering, load‑balancing or replicated services where supported
- architecture documentation should cover logical and physical components
- dependencies should include upstream and downstream systems, shared services and infrastructure components
- documentation should support impact assessment during incidents, recovery and change
Last edited: 18 June 2026 12:37 pm