With some 4000 employees, 58 ambulance stations and 864 vehicles to provide emergency medical care for a population of 5.3 million across 5,000 square miles, West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) NHS Trust has been recognised as ‘Ambulance Service of the Year’ no fewer than four times since its formation in 2006. Indeed, during 2010-11, it was the only trust to achieve all four national performance standards.

However, a lack of standardisation across multiple IT systems following the amalgamation of several services was making it difficult for staff to communicate and collaborate effectively. For example, WMAS was running three instances of Exchange, none of which was large enough to accommodate the needs of the whole organisation, according to head of IM&T, Phil Collins.

“The absence of a common email platform meant our employees lacked a shared address book with which to locate one another,” he says. “We considered our options and recognised that we required collaboration tools, rather than just a replacement email system.”

“We needed to consolidate our systems and get everybody onto a uniform platform as quickly and easily as possible,” he says. “Whilst we knew that moving to the cloud would help us overcome our problems, we also needed to maintain the highest level of security around our patient data.”

Consolidation and savings

Collins says the answer came in the form of Microsoft partner IMGROUP, who could deliver WMAS’ requirement for security, flexibility and completeness by combining cloud services with on-premise applications. “By moving us to Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud service and SharePoint 2010 collaboration platform, they enabled us to simplify, consolidate and manage our communications at a stroke.”

With over five million licenced users, Office 365 combines secure cloud versions of Microsoft’s familiar communications and collaboration products:

• Office Professional Plus and Office Web Apps for productivity across PC, phone and browser,
• SharePoint for data management,
• Exchange for email and Lync for unified communications

It cuts the cost and resource needed to maintain servers and software in-house, whilst giving WMAS employees the same rich experience online they’ve come to expect from their desktop Office programs.

Office 365 works seamlessly with the programs WMAS staff already use. In one simple service, they now have reliable, use-anywhere access to ambulance service tools like the intranet, email, online meetings and calendars. Additionally, they also benefit from the full suite of collaboration tools like instant messaging, voice/video/web conferencing and document management and sharing – all via most web enabled devices and using any popular browser.

WMAS staff can now collaborate quickly and securely with both colleagues and other emergency services, for example:

• Directly from a Word document, see if a colleague is available to discuss it.
• escalate a PC-to-PC voice call up to an interactive online meeting
• and voicemails are delivered right to the Outlook inbox

“With staff spread across the West Midlands, we now have a platform that will potentially save us time and money and enable better team working,” says Collins. “For instance, Lync’s videoconferencing and ‘presence’ features mean that staff will potentially travel less and therefore use their time more efficiently. Not least, Office 365 gives us built-in scalability and disaster recovery to consolidate and manage our growing volume of data – all for a predictable price.”

G-Cloud trailblazers

With all these benefits, healthcare organisations should be queuing up to deploy Cloud services. The challenge thus far has been one of trust: with data protection issues never far from the headlines, it’s no surprise that many Trusts are jittery about externalising data. But WMAS is the first ambulance service to negotiate a contract under the G-Cloud Framework, part of the Government Procurement Services’ commitment to see public cloud services account for 50% of new public ICT spending by 2015.

By creating a marketplace of cloud services called CloudStore, IMGROUP’s head of Office 365 Sales, Marcel Bonfrer, says Whitehall has made it easier for suppliers and NHS purchasing departments to work together. “It means they can now order ICT products and services direct from accredited suppliers with confidence; without having to go through a long-winded tender process,’” he says. Under the G-Cloud regime, suppliers are pre-vetted into a Framework Agreement which features mandatory assurance checks on a wide range of technical and fiscal criteria.

Microsoft and several of its UK partners, including IMGROUP, were among the first to qualify as members of the G-Cloud Supplier Community, providing key online services including Office 365, CRM Online, Windows Azure and Microsoft Consulting Services.

Bonfrer says that, far from representing a data risk, Office 365 mitigates risk to patient-sensitive data by enabling WMAS to migrate its Office, email and SharePoint content to the Cloud: “Storing data in a Microsoft datacentre is infinitely safer than on an in-house server. Office 365 comes with a 99.9% uptime SLA financially backed by Microsoft. It incorporates multiple layers of security and data is backed-up and rigorously screened 24/7 by highly trained staff, so how can it fail to be more secure than on a bunch of servers in a basement? You’re also freed from the costly burden of deploying and managing antivirus, anti-spam and backup solutions in-house, plus you get all the latest updates without having to buy or install new software.”

Bonfrer says that since Office 365 interoperates 100% with its on-premise equivalents, organisations can in any case embrace the “best of both” to fit their circumstances at any given time. “Distinct from many other vendors’ offerings, Microsoft cloud solutions give you the flexibility to temporarily or permanently maintain a hybrid environment so you can move to the cloud gradually or maintain some users on-premises indefinitely.”

“Our hybrid approach means we can help healthcare organisations maximise the benefit from the cloud in a risk-free manner. Many are struggling with the alchemy of how to do more with less and see their IT budgets eaten up with maintaining existing systems. Cloud computing is an opportunity to redress these numbers, additionally allowing these organisations to innovate and drive change.”

A platform for the future

“Our appointment to the G-Cloud Supplier Community will allow NHS organisations like WMAS to benefit from Microsoft’s long-term investment in cloud technology,” says Mark Smith, Director of Healthcare & Life Sciences, Microsoft. “We’re delighted to see partners like IMGROUP successfully bidding to be part of the Framework and building cloud solutions for the health sector based on our technologies.”

“Office 365 and other Microsoft online services will help the NHS leverage the power of the cloud more easily to streamline business processes whilst delivering scalable, high performance solutions and providing a platform for the future. We believe these technologies will effectively support the Government’s objective to deliver 50% of its new ICT services from the cloud by 2015 and to continue to drive overall costs down at the same time.”

To find out more about O365 in health, click here

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We know it’s your data.

Your data doesn’t stop being your data just because it’s on our servers. We will only use your data to provide the cloud services you purchase. If you store data through any of our cloud services, we respect your ownership of that data at every step of the way. We don’t scan it. We don’t share it. We don’t exploit it.

That means:

• We’re transparent about how your data is stored. You can learn about our security standards online, as well as explore data location maps, examine service level information and understand the key privacy and security commitments we make to all our cloud service customers.
• You always control access. You control which accounts from your domain can access the data you store with us, using the same sets of permissions and controls that you likely use today, using your Active Directory federated to our services in the cloud.
• We protect your data while it’s moving to and from our servers. Nobody gets to sneak a peak in transit.
• You get to decide what devices can be used to access your data. You’ll get numerous features built into our services which give you and your administrators the ability to manage your data. For government use at the OFFICIAL security level, we strongly recommend following the End User Device guidance to configure and manage your devices and the browser configuration security guidance to ensure your end devices are protected.
• We don’t grant governments a free pass to see your data. Microsoft does not provide any government or any other third party with direct and unfettered access to its customer’s data and does not provide any means of circumventing encryption protecting customer data.

It’s simple: We only use customer data to provide customers with cloud services. That’s it. That shouldn’t just be our standard. Every cloud provider should be able to able to say the same.

Learn more about data privacy and best-in-class cloud services

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The truth is that cybersecurity isn’t one monolithic concept. It’s a combination of several disciplines — and most people are lucky if they can manage to master one. Unfortunately, focusing on just one area isn’t going to cut it. That’s like triple-bolting the door, then leaving the window wide-open.

Whether your store your data in the Microsoft cloud or via some other system, there some essential security questions every business should ask about their data security:

• Is your data encrypted? The Web is full of people trying to peek at your data, from criminals to law enforcement agencies. It’s essential that your data be encrypted so that it won’t be accessible, even if the worst should happen. Does your storage solution encrypt your data at rest? How about when in transit? Is the encryption strong enough to be suitable for UK government documents up to the OFFICIAL – SENSITIVE level?
• Are you able to manage staff access to data? Almost two-thirds of enterprise data leaks are the result of employees either maliciously or accidentally releasing confidential data. One of the easiest ways to prevent those leaks is by tightly managing employee access to critical data on a file level. Are you able to easily control and manage the use of cloud resources, restricting access to users? Are you able to limit access to the devices that you specify?
• Are you able to get security feature details? Does your cloud provider disclose the security features of their software and data centres? Can you get specific details on where and how your data will be stored?

We’re proud to say we can answer “yes” to all the questions above. All our cloud services are designed, developed and operated to ensure customer data is secure. We begin working on security measures early in a product’s life. And we never stop. We are relentless.

That shouldn’t just be our standard. Any company offering a cloud service ought to be able to say the same.

Learn more about data security and best-in-class cloud services

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Microsoft does it all the time.

In December 2013, we formally challenged the geographic reach of a U.S. criminal search warrant, arguing that email should receive the same treatment as physical documents or other property, where the U.S. Government cannot obtain a search warrant to seize property located outside the United States. The case is on appeal. At issue is customer e-mail content for a single user of our free web-based email service, Outlook.com, which are located exclusively in a datacentre outside the United States, in Dublin, Ireland.

In our view, just as the U.S. government does not have the power to search a home in another country, it should not have the power to search the content of email stored in datacentres overseas. And we are not alone in this belief. On December 13, 2014 we filed our Appeal brief and a few days later a who’s who of the technology industry, academia and the Irish government themselves all filed briefs with the court in support of our position. We continue to fight this battle diligently today.

It’s not that we oppose law enforcement accessing information that could fight crime and manage national security. We just know that there’s a right way to go about these things. We believe the advent of cloud computing should not be used as a blunt force to cut across these established processes. When your data is in one country and the government of another country wants to reach into a data centre and have a look, the laws of the country where the data is stored must be taken into account.

Why? Why would an American company spend considerable time and treasure defending the privacy of UK customers? Why would we fight for the big customers and the little ones all the same? Why regularly disclose the status of all our privacy battles?

Simple: Your data isn’t ours to share. Privacy isn’t a bonus feature. It’s a bedrock principle. And it’s one we’re willing to defend thousands of times per year, all over the world, in a way that no one else will. Nobody does more to protect your data.

Learn more anout protection your data and best-in-class cloud services

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Want more? Learn how to put data to work throughout your organisation.

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