Part of Infrastructure hosting standards for the NHS
Power and cooling
Standards you should meet on power and cooling for your hosted infrastructure.
1. NHS organisations should ensure hosting environments are supported by resilient and protected power arrangements
Importance of meeting the standard
Reliable and resilient power is essential for the safe delivery of digital clinical and operational services. Disruption to power supply can immediately affect access to critical systems, delay care and introduce patient safety risk.
Hosting environments must be protected from short‑term power disturbances as well as prolonged outages. Different NHS settings have varying power needs, but all require power arrangements that are proportionate to the criticality of the services being supported and that enable either continued operation or safe, controlled shutdown.
When to meet the standard
- installing or upgrading hosting, compute, storage or network equipment
- carrying out estates’ improvement, electrical work or data room refurbishment
- introducing systems with increased dependency on digital availability
- reviewing business continuity, clinical safety or infrastructure resilience risks
How to meet the standard
- power resilience reflects the criticality of the systems hosted (clinical, operational, administrative)
- hosting environments are supplied by clean, conditioned power and isolated from non‑critical building loads
- critical hosting equipment is protected by appropriately sized uninterruptible power supplies (UPS)
- UPS capacity supports either continued operation or safe, controlled shutdown as required
- medium and high criticality environments have additional resilience measures (such as redundant feeds, generator backup, or validated alternatives where appropriate)
- power arrangements are understood and reflected in business continuity, disaster recovery and digital resilience planning
- hosting environments should use protected power circuits isolated from general building loads
- UPS solutions should be appropriate to load, runtime requirements and future growth
- UPS systems should support monitoring, alerting and routine testing
- where generator support is relied upon, automatic change‑over mechanisms should be in place and tested regularly
- power distribution within racks should use suitable PDUs with sufficient capacity and diversity
2. NHS organisations should ensure hosting environments maintain stable and monitored environmental conditions
Importance of meeting the standard
Hosting infrastructure must operate within defined environmental conditions to support safe and reliable operation. Excessive temperature, inadequate cooling, or unmanaged humidity can lead to hardware failure, degraded performance, data loss and unplanned service disruption.
Environmental issues often develop gradually and may go unnoticed without effective monitoring. Maintaining both stable environmental conditions and timely visibility of deviations is essential to reduce the risk of service impact and to support early intervention before patient care or critical operations are affected.
When to meet the standard
- constructing, refurbishing or repurposing hosting rooms or spaces
- deploying or scaling hosting, compute, storage or network equipment
- introducing higher density or heat‑generating workloads
- reviewing incidents, resilience risks or operational performance
How to meet the standard
- hosting environments have sufficient cooling capacity for the equipment and load being supported
- temperature and humidity are maintained within manufacturer‑recommended operating ranges
- airflow within hosting spaces is managed to prevent hotspots and obstruction
- environmental conditions remain controlled outside normal office hours where required
- environmental monitoring is in place to detect and alert deviations that could affect service availability
- alerts and thresholds are defined for conditions requiring investigation or intervention
- environmental risks are considered as part of operational and resilience planning
- cooling systems should be appropriate to room size, equipment density and expected growth
- environmental monitoring should include temperature, humidity and cooling system status
- monitoring systems should provide timely alerts and retain historical data for trend analysis
- sensors and monitoring points should be positioned to reflect actual equipment conditions
- environmental monitoring should integrate with wider operational alerting where possible
Last edited: 18 June 2026 10:32 am