Role guidance on Cloud

Clinical people within health and social care organisations need to use technology capabilities to optimise medical outcomes with cloud technologies being the foundation.

Example roles

• CCIO (Chief Clinical Information Officer)
• clinical research staff
• clinicians 

Why Cloud is important to my role

Cloud technology is improving how care teams diagnose, treat, communicate, and learn every day. It helps hospitals and health systems address key challenges, including:

• keeping clinical data and information secure;
• increasing operational efficiency and flexibility;
• retaining valuable clinical staff; and
• strengthening patient care and experience

Cloud technologies are becoming the foundation of clinical systems around the world. Examples of this include electronic patient record (EPR) systems storing patient data, clinical triage systems which can include analytical or AI-based functions, and those for clinical research of structured and instructed data.

The use of the cloud unlocks opportunities for providing better patient outcomes in the clinical technology space which was once restrained either by compute, memory, or storage which are no longer issues due to the scalability, infinite storage and reusable functions that the cloud offers. The use of public cloud which mainly uses the internet for connectivity also enables patient data to be shared with other clinicians whether that be in another profession, location, or between private and public healthcare bodies in a secure and auditable manor. An example of this is for private eye care organisations having the ability to seamlessly share a patient's ophthalmic images to the NHS and specialist hospitals around the UK.

The benefits to patients with the use of clinical systems hosted on the cloud are great facilitators with interoperability and data that patients are used to in a digital world. The patient social life is mostly driven by digital interactions that have now fast become the “new normal” with video consultations or with virtual wards. These are underpinned by cloud technologies where the patient no longer has to worry about the installation of application, as this is becoming native into the devices giving a better patient experience.

The future of clinical services in a world of robotics, wearable technologies, and patient clinical sensors such as blood pressure monitors have to be built on top of public cloud technologies. This is due to the scale and reach that cloud has coupled with the compute and storage that will be required to capture and calculate the data into information that can be used by a clinician or AI service to assist in better patient outcomes.

Leaders of people management for procurement, finance, and commercial agreements. manage, maintain and report upon commercial interests.

Example roles

• CFO (Chief Financial Officer)
• finance leaders
• commercial leads
• legal team leads
• audit team leads

Why Cloud is important to my role

Finance, procurement and commercial teams are now changing the way they work in a new discipline label as “FinOps” which is bringing together the much-needed experience of financial teams into cross-functional teams in engineering, finance, product, enabling faster product delivery, while at the same time gaining more financial control and predictability. FinOps is the practice of bringing a financial accountability cultural change to the variable spend model of the cloud, enabling distributed engineering and business teams to make trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality in their cloud architecture and investment decisions. It helps NHS and healthcare organisations address key challenges, including:

• understanding near real-time cloud usage and costs to aid decision making;
• increasing operational efficiency and flexibility by utilisation tracking’
• retaining valuable procurement, finance, and commercial staff; and
• strengthening and gaining additional value from commercial agreements by variable cost models of the cloud

Cloud technologies are becoming the foundation of business systems around the world including how organisations capture, store and analyse business financial data. This includes contractual key performance indexing systems which can also incorporate analytical or AI-based functions. This is important for understanding key trends within structured and instructed data that can monitor the value of cloud service from a financial and commercial agreement viewpoint.

The use of the cloud unlocks opportunities for providing better value to taxpayers who fund the NHS, including both administrative and clinical technology spaces, which were once restrained either by compute, memory, or storage. These are no longer issues due to the scalability, infinite storage, and reusable functions that the cloud offers. The cloud also drives efficiency savings with the cost of these services being subject to utilisation (you only pay for what you use). Moreover, instant cost savings can be realised by time boxing services such as development and test environments so that they are only consumed when required and not charged for outside of these periods. 

The use of the public cloud, which mainly uses the internet for connectivity, also enables citizen and patient data to be shared with other NHS and healthcare organisations. This can result in a cost reduction of service as no additional cost of a private network is factored into the overall service cost. An example of cost savings within the NHS is NHS England, which through a cloud cost monitoring tooling, have identified and acted upon data that has enabled them to create future cost avoidance by only having services running when required. Additionally, financial data has been used to structure new deals with suppliers and advantage taken of prepayment offerings made by cloud suppliers.

The benefits to citizens and patients with the use of health and social care services hosted on the cloud are great facilitators with interoperability and, data that patients are used to in a digital world. The use of a FinOps approach also provides confidence that services are being managed in a commercially mature way with data being one of the driving factors around decisions. This can be made more efficient with historical data or having the ability to flex in case of any future unforeseen events.

The future of NHS and healthcare organisations that use cloud technologies, that are underpinned by using a cloud culture, is an innovative one where financial and technology teams are no longer siloed and without having large ongoing commercial overheads of operational and commercial activities such as upfront costs, hardware replacements, and physical building constraints. As a result, this will allow its people to use their skills to better serve the organisation and its customers without the restrictions and boundaries that physical hardware presents. The FinOps approach enables teams to get an overall picture of organisational spending on the cloud and can then take advantage of economies of scale within their organisation. This can be achieved by either front-loading payment (reserving) capacity in the cloud or by identifying where new cost-efficient technologies/approaches are available and sustainable. Financial best practices between product teams can also be shared.

In addition to the above, the use of cloud services also has a great benefit on green and sustainable efforts within the NHS and the wider UK. This is because, major cloud providers have or are committed to being carbon negative/neutral and provide tooling to understand what carbon impacts an organisation is having.

IT Security focused people who are interested in organisation system/service health and reliability, security, and governance through moving to the cloud.

Example roles

• CISO (Chief Information Security Officer)
• Information governance leads
• IT security managers
• security architects
• IT security engineers
• data protection officers

Why Cloud is important to my role

Cloud technologies are routed on security and compliance with all major cloud vendors investing significantly in security within their platforms; from their underlying infrastructure to providing security technologies such as WAF’s and DoS mitigations, to monitoring and alerting tooling that their customers can consume. This also enables the cloud services providers, alongside their customers, to have the ability to respond rapidly to any security issues that may occur and deflect or alert threats. This sends out advanced audit capabilities on a number of levels from access auditing, change controls, network and custom application auditing threads.

As a number of these services are built into the cloud providers core offering, reports can be produced with near real-time information and where required advance triggers can be set up where a security alert is triggered where service can be patched and rebuilt to mitigate the threat. As cloud technologies have advanced and new services such as function as a service (serverless) have evolved, this has enabled more of the security risks to be managed by the cloud service providers which have funding and advanced capabilities to identify, investigate and mitigate potential security issues. This enables Health and Social care organisations focus more on their organisational security and information governance landscapes and gain confidence within development teams that are building on secure Cloud platforms. This helps NHS and healthcare organisations address key challenges including

• keeping organisational including clinical data and information secure;
• increasing operational efficiency and flexibility by using secure and governance approved guardrails;
• retaining valuable security and governance staff to focus assurances on what the organisation hosts within the cloud and not being overwhelmed by the entire IT estate; and
• providing IT Security and Governance Teams with Evergreen Security tooling and reporting so threats can be impacted using data and traced efficiently

Cloud technologies are becoming the foundation of business systems around the world including how organisations capture, store and analyse business intelligence data. This includes business key performance indexing around security and governance which can also include analytical or AI-based functions to aid security teams when reacting to possible threats, and for understanding key trends within environments to detect any security anomalies over a historic period.

The use of the cloud unlocks opportunities for providing better citizen and patient outcomes including the IT security technology which was once restrained either by security appliance(s) compute, memory, or storage. These are no longer issues due to the scalability, infinite storage, and reusable functions that the cloud offers. The use of public cloud which mainly uses the internet for connectivity also enables citizen and patient data to be shared with other NHS and healthcare organisations via secure means that don't need dedicated private networks and security appliances to connect to another healthcare profession or service, location, or between private and public healthcare bodies in a secure and auditable manner. An example of this data security being transferred between 2 organisations cloud subscriptions is using a secure virtual private cloud peering complemented by security controls managed at both sides of the connection to transfer covid data between organisations.

The benefits to patients with the use of clinical systems hosted on the cloud are great facilitators with interoperability and, data that patients are used to in a digital world. The patient social life is mostly driven by digital interactions that have now fast become the “new normal” with secure encrypted video consultations or with virtual wards that are underpinned by IoT cloud technologies, with encryption where credentials are cycled over a small period of time. This allows the patient the confidence to no longer worry about their data being compromised or the application or medical appliance being hacked which gives a better patient experience and comfort.

The future of NHS and healthcare organisations that use cloud technologies, that are underpinned by using a cloud culture, is an innovative one where technology is no longer restrained by large ongoing overheads of security activities such as patching, security hardware replacements, and physical security appliance systems constraints. This will now allow its people to use their skills to better serve the organisation and its customers without the restrictions and boundaries that physical hardware presents. In addition to this, the use of cloud services within security allows services to become more proactive to security events. This includes an increased ability to capture security data while automatically analysing historical security trends. This provides advance warning of a security breach or limits the future impact of a security breach event.

Leaders within the organisations whom need to support capabilities to optimise business value with cloud adoption along with cultural and business process change.

Example roles

• CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
• CIO (Chief Information Officer)
• CCIO (Chief Clinical Information Officer)
• COO (Chief Operating Officer)
• CFO (Chief Financial Officer)
• CTO (Chief Technical Officer)
• CDO (Chief Digital Officer)
• Organisation strategy leads

Why Cloud is important to my role

Cloud technology is improving how leaders with their organisation can empower the organisation using a cloud culture which includes being agile, having the ability to respond rapidly to business changes that are expected and unexpected, changes to customer requirements, and using cloud technologies to bridge silos within the organisation including the wider NHS ecosystem. It helps NHS and healthcare organisations address key challenges, including

• keeping organisational, including clinical data and information secure;
• increasing operational efficiency and flexibility;
• retaining valuable technical, operational, and clinical staff; and
• strengthening patient care and digital experiences

Cloud technologies are becoming the foundation of business systems around the world including how organisations capture, store and analyse business intelligence data, including business key performance indexing systems, which can also include analytical or AI-based functions, and also for understanding key trends within structured and instructed data.

The use of the cloud unlocks opportunities for providing better citizen and patient outcomes including the clinical technology space which was once restrained either by compute, memory, or storage which are no longer issues due to the scalability, infinite storage, and reusable functions that the cloud offers. The use of public cloud which mainly uses the internet for connectivity also enables citizen and patient data to be shared with other NHS and healthcare organisations whether that be in another healthcare profession or service, location, or between private and public healthcare bodies in a secure and auditable manner. An example of this is for private eye care organisations having the ability to seamlessly share a patient's ophthalmic images to the NHS and specialist hospitals around the UK.

The benefits to patients with the use of clinical systems hosted on the cloud are great facilitators with interoperability and, data that patients are used to in a digital world. The patient social life is mostly driven by digital interactions that have now fast become the “new normal” with video consultations or with virtual wards that are underpinned by cloud technologies where the patient no longer has to worry about the installation of application but now becoming native into the devices which give a better patient experience.

The future of NHS and healthcare organisations that use cloud technologies, that are underpinned by using a cloud culture, is an innovative one where technology is no longer restrained by large ongoing overheads of operational activities such as patching, hardware replacements, and physical systems constraints. Instead, it will allow its people to use their skills to better serve the organisation and its customers without the restrictions and boundaries that physical hardware presents. In addition to this, the use of cloud services also has a great benefit on Green and Sustainable efforts within the NHS and the wider UK, as major cloud providers have or committed to being carbon negative/neutral and provide tooling to understand what carbon impacts an organisation is having.

People manage, measuring and lead business programmes and product delivery which result in business outcomes being delivered.

Example roles

• programme leads
• product leads
• enterprise architects
• business architects
• business analysts
• project leads
• transformation leads

Why Cloud is important to my role

Cloud technology is improving how organisations can empower people, process and direction using a cloud culture. This includes being agile, having the ability to respond rapidly to business changes that are expected and unexpected, changes to customer requirements, and using cloud technologies to bridge silos within the organisation including the wider NHS ecosystem. It helps NHS and healthcare organisations address key challenges, including

• keeping organisational including clinical data and information secure;
• increasing operational efficiency and flexibility;
• retaining valuable technical, operational, and clinical staff; and
• strengthening patient care and digital experiences

Cloud technologies are becoming the foundation of business systems and organisational development around the world including how organisations capture, store and analyse, business intelligence data, including business key performance indexing systems. In addition, this can also incorporate analytical or AI-based functions to help understanding key trends within structured and instructed data. Establishing an appropriate cloud operating model is critical to forming your organisation’s successful adoption of cloud and delivering greater business agility. The impact of the cloud will be felt across your entire organisation (not just information technology) and will significantly affect, and be affected by, your organisational culture and information technology delivery structures. Understanding these implications and your company's desire to change are important elements of building a successful cloud operating model.

Several key activities can facilitate, support, and even accelerate the achievement of cloud adoption and delivery of business outcomes. Organisations almost always have a multitude of competing priorities, even within their business strategy. Failure to transform operating models can result in a great stall phenomenon where adoption momentum stops or slows to a crawl. One of the key factors observed avoiding this effect has been the successful establishment of cloud delivery and governance function often referred to as a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) or Cloud Enablement. Below are six steps that organisations should follow to build out a successful Cloud enablement function.

Successful adopters take two key actions to help ensure they own their own lifecycle and deliver meaningful benefits. Firstly, they align the operating model delivery approach to the strategic value of the workload. While the Cloud Platform and the Engineering team should be adopting a DevOps (you build it, you run it) approach, don’t expect everyone else to immediately have the desire to make the same change to their delivery model. In our engagements with wider partners, we have seen three broad approaches being adopted

For teams that are on the bleeding edge of technology or looking to consume the latest cloud services, this model is being adopted widely. In this model application engineering is responsible for their applications, but in order to avoid stifling innovation for high growth areas of the company, they are empowered to build out platform capabilities that have not yet been standardised by the Cloud Platform Engineering team. Cloud Platform Engineering still provides standard accounts and guard rails that prevent Application teams from configuring services in a way that would expose the enterprise to inappropriate security, financial, or operational risk.

The benefits to citizens, patients, and the wider organisation using the approach with cloud adoption are that it is a great facilitator with innovation, interoperability, data integrity, and resilience. These are the outcomes of having cloud-based systems that everyone are used to in a digital world. When working toward the unknown (even if we assume there’s something worth it on the other side), human nature is to put blockers or constraints in the way. That’s why the key element to remember is that all assumed constraints are debatable. Beyond that, it’s about figuring out how you’re going to bring everyone along for the transformative journey.

The future of NHS and healthcare organisations that use cloud technologies, that are underpinned by using a cloud culture, is an innovative one where organisations are no longer restrained by siloed working with large ongoing overheads of operational activities such as patching, hardware replacements, and physical systems constraints and long drawn out processes. In future the reality will but one that will allow its people to use their skills to better serve the organisation and its customers without the restrictions and boundaries that current organisational process and physical hardware presents. In addition to this, the use of cloud services is also having a great benefit on green and sustainable efforts within the NHS and the wider UK as major cloud providers have or are committed to being carbon negative/neutral and provide tooling to understand what carbon impacts an organisation is having.

Leaders of people management and organisation development whom are responsible for training, communications and organisational change management.

Example roles

• CPO (Chief People Officer)
• human resources leads
• people managers
• organisational development leads

Why Cloud is important to my role

Cloud technology is improving how organisations can empower and attract the right talent to the workforce using a cloud culture. This includes being agile, having the ability to respond rapidly to business changes that are expected and unexpected, using innovative and leading edge technologies, and using cloud technologies to bridge silos within the organisation, including the wider NHS ecosystem. It helps NHS HR teams and healthcare organisations address key challenges, including

• keeping the organisation staff personal development focused on innovation and direction, making it more measurable;
• increasing operational efficiency and flexibility within job roles;
• attracting and retaining valuable technical, operational, and clinical staff directly and indirectly through adoption of cloud technologies; and
• providing staff with career progressing through a large number of roles focused around cloud

Cloud technologies are becoming the foundation of business systems around the world including how organisations attract and retain talent via the capture, store and analysis of business intelligence data, including business key performance indexing systems which incorporate analytical or AI-based functions for understanding key trends. The use of cloud technologies are the foundation of many new and up and coming technologies including medical robotics, clinical decision making, and patient care.

The use of the cloud unlocks opportunities for providing the workforce with increased flexibility on where and how they work, and in some cases, also removes the barriers of where your workforce needs to be to carry out their role. Cloud technologies are enabling the HR teams to recruit wider and more efficiently when attracting key talent with the help of online job boards and recruitment data. Further utilising targeted campaigns using data collected and internet-based recruitment sites, which take advantage of cloud services such as NHS Jobs.

In addition, the benefits to patients which attract and retain talent around cloud adoption are with the use of clinical systems hosted on the cloud. These are great facilitators with interoperability and, data integrity and resistance are the outcomes of having cloud-based systems that patients are used to in a digital world. The patient social life is mostly driven by digital interactions that have now fast become the “new normal” with video consultations or with virtual wards. These are underpinned by cloud technologies where the patient no longer has to worry about the installation of application, but now becoming native into the devices which give a better patient experience.

The future of NHS and healthcare organisations that use cloud technologies that are underpinned by using a cloud culture with talent is encouraged to be innovative and one where technology is no longer restraint with large ongoing overheads of operational activities such as patching, hardware replacements, and physical systems constraints. The future in reality will be one that will allow its people to use their skills to better serve the organisation and its customers without the restrictions and boundaries that physical hardware presents. In addition to this, the use of cloud services also has a great benefit on green and sustainable efforts within the NHS and the wider UK. This is because major cloud providers have or are committed to being carbon negative/neutral and provide tooling to understand what carbon impacts an organisation is having. This can also be a sentimental reason for recruiting talent into an organisation that is focused on the environment.

Description of role

Technical people leading, developing, migrating, maintaining, assuring and optimising applications and services which are based upon cloud solutions and services.

Example roles

• CTO (Chief Technical Officer)
• CDO (Chief Digital Officer)
• IT directors/managers
• solution architects
• platform leads
• development leads
• quality assurance leads
• change managers
• IT operations leads

Why Cloud is Important to my role

Cloud technology is improving the ways IT infrastructure, development, and operation teams are managing and creating new applications with development and deployment now able to happen in much shorter time scales than historically. The Cloud is not just about technology, but It helps IT Teams address key challenges, including:

• making IT teams more agile with increased collaboration, not just in the IT department in the ways they work, but wider within an organisation including Security, IG, and Finance teams enabling streamlined, efficient, and assured conception, creating and deployments of services;
• increasing operational and cost efficiencies, scalability and flexibility within IT Departments;
• access from anywhere enables IT staff to work from any location that is connected to the internet;
• retaining valuable IT staff by allowing them to innovate on new cloud technologies;
• strengthening patient care and experience by increasing availability and business continuity of IT services;
• support new business opportunities in emerging technology spaces; and
• enables a process to refresh aging infrastructure efficiently with no excessive expenditure

Cloud offers solutions to problems that Architects, Infrastructure engineers, developer’s face while creating and managing applications with most services a simple integration away. Various cloud service providers give solutions to all complex development problems. Every development project is different and has its own varying needs. This means that there is no one size fits all formula. Cloud fulfils your unique needs by letting you choose from a wide range of different service models and options. There are three different service models that developers can choose from including:

• software as a service
• platform as a service
• infrastructure as a service
• function as a service

In infrastructure as a service environment, everything from virtual machines, storage devices, firewalls and other hardware components is all managed, but the operating system and software are your responsibilities. Updating the operating system and software, installing patches and configuring the software is your duty.

The platform as a service and function as a service models cover all the hardware and software along with maintenance. This frees up IT Infrastructure and development teams to focus on building and deploying applications and can easily take advantage of database, website and additional services. Software as a service model offers you fully fledged software with all the features like a service instead of a product. You can use the software as a service without having to buy it, and pay for only what you use and in most cases just integrate via a simple API call.

Cloud technologies are becoming the foundation of clinical systems around the world including electronic patient record (EPR) systems storing patient data, clinical triage systems, business operation systems, HR Systems, Data and analytical systems, which can also include analytical or AI-based functions, and clinical research of structured and instructed data. As a result, this also enables IT Teams to valuable insights and tooling into their IT estate including.

The use of the cloud unlocks opportunities for providing better citizen, patient, and workforce outcomes in the Health and Social Care technology space which was once restrained either by compute, memory, or storage. These are no longer issues due to the scalability, infinite storage, and reusable functions that the cloud offers. The use of public cloud which mainly uses the internet for connectivity also enables citizen, patient and workforce data to be shared with other organisations whether that be in another organisation, location, or between private and public healthcare bodies in a secure and auditable manner. An example of this is for private eye care organisations having the ability to seamlessly share a patient's ophthalmic images to the NHS and specialist hospitals around the UK.

The benefits to patients with the use of clinical systems hosted on the cloud are great facilitators with interoperability and, data that patients are used to in a digital world. The patient social life is mostly driven by digital interactions that have now fast become the “new normal” with video consultations or with virtual wards that are underpinned by cloud technologies where the patient no longer has to worry about the installation of application as it is now becoming native in the devices which give a better patient experience.

The future of IT healthcare services is a world of personalised IT experiences which are data-driven, with robotic and wearable technologies. IoT clinical sensors such as blood pressure monitors have to be built on top of public cloud technologies. This is due to the scale and reach that cloud has coupled with the compute and storage that will be required to capture and calculate the data into information, which can then be used by a citizen, a patient, a clinician or AI service to assist in better patient outcomes.