Spine in the Cloud

Spine has moved from being hosted across physical data centres to the cloud. This is a vital objective of the Spine Futures programme, creating a scalable platform that will make use of modern technologies and open standards to ensure it meets the needs of NHS users for many years to come.

The live services cut over took place over two tranches – the first on 5 October 2023 and the second on 12 October 2023. Now we have migrated, we will have opportunity to optimise Spine in the cloud and leverage the benefits of cloud-native tools to help decouple and improve the services.

By moving the Spine to Cloud we will enable these benefits:

• Security: Strengthen our resilience against potential future cyber-attacks and improve recovery time in the event of an attack
• Reliability: Maintain a high level of reliability and uptime
• Scalability: Enable the ability to scale infrastructure based on demand, ensuring the system can handle peak loads and reduce costs by scaling infrastructure when it’s not needed
• Sustainability: By utilising scaling infrastructure we reduce the carbon footprint of the service
• Maintainability: New services can be built using native cloud tooling and serverless architecture, which will enable teams to be more responsive to changing user needs

November

• Power down LIVE and REF environments on-prem
• Start hardware decommissioning and disposal

December

• Hardware decommissioning continued
• Remove all hardware and exit from data centre