Healthcare Case Studies
NHS Scotland: Case Study
Sector/Main Activities:
Healthcare
Location:
Nationwide
Challenges
- Reliable backup for Microsoft 365, even as users move between NHS Scotland organizations (NHS Boards).
- Rigorous compliance and governance requirements.
- Pressure to optimize use of M 365 licenses.
Solution
- Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup.
Benefits
- Supports 22 implementations on a single tenancy, for nationwide scale while meeting strict data governance requirements.
- Ease of data recovery.
- Simple deployment and ongoing management maximizes IT productivity.
- Maximizes use of Microsoft 365 licenses.
The Background
NHS Scotland is the country’s publicly funded healthcare system, one of four which comprise the UK’s National Health Service.NHS Scotland’s annual budget is over £15bn ($18.3bn) and it employs more than 147,000 staff.NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) has an annual budget of approximately £3bn ($3.7bn) and serves over a million people, making one of the largest healthcare providers in Europe.
Empowering Scotland’s National Health Service with simple, streamlined cloud backup
Loss of email data is an annoyance for many organizations. For those operating in the highly regulated healthcare sector, it’s often far more serious—especially in an era of intense pandemic-related workplace pressure. It’s a challenge that kept NHSGGC’s Finlay Craig awake at night. After it was decided to migrate the health service’s NHS mail platform to a single nationwide Microsoft 365 tenancy, which will serve the country’s 22 individual NHS Boards, the question of backup loomed into view.
“We came from a well-protected environment both in the cloud and on-premises,” says Finlay, whose role is Strategy Development and Program Manager for Architecture and Cloud Services, in NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde. “I had sleepless nights knowing we didn’t have that capability any more in Microsoft 365.”
The Solution
Fortunately, Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup passed the health service’s rigorous procurement process and has since become an indispensable platform for NHSGGC and now NHS Scotland as a whole.
Providing peace of mind
With 45,000 NHSGGC users and many more licences to manage, Finlay had multiple backup challenges. When users move between Boards, as they frequently do in NHS Scotland, they are forced to jump between one Microsoft 365 license and another. But Finlay found that if their gap in usage was too long (over 30 days) they risked losing their entire mailbox. Fortunately, this only happened on a handful of occasions.
“It’s not a nice call to make, personally or professionally, because some of these people have stored data which is important to them within their email,” he explains.
A priority was, therefore, having a reliable third-party backup solution to provide peace of mind that this wouldn’t happen in the future. Also important for NHS Scotland was a way to remove licences that were genuinely not needed anymore, while adhering to Board retention policies of 15 months.
“While we would always say you shouldn’t rely on email to store critical information, I have always felt that when data was protected we have a level of redundancy that gives IT services a fighting chance to recover” says Finlay. “If you have a backup, you can sort the problem."
The Outcome
Passing the test
NHS Scotland and NHSGGC are governed by a strict set of procurement rules, which required Barracuda and several other vendors to submit formal tender documents, both at a local and national level. NHS technical teams work independently from commercial and security functions to assess each product. In the end, Barracuda was judged to be the solution that checked most boxes for technical requirements while being the simplest to deploy, says Finlay.
Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup provides comprehensive, cost-effective, scalable backup and recovery for Microsoft 365 data—including Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive. It delivers rapid data search and recovery and the ability to restore fully or with highly granular detail. Roles-based access controls and AES 256 data encryption at rest and in transit add extra security. And the simple to deploy and manage cloud solution backs up three external copies of all data.
“It hooked right into our dynamic groups within Active Directory so we didn’t have an awful lot to do,” Finlay explains of the implementation process.
“That’s not to say it was without its challenges. The network had to be tuned to migrate a massive amount of data. But technically it wasn’t that hard. And when it came to do the next Board in Lothian it took half the time, thanks to what we’d learned in NHS GGC.”.
Going nationwide
Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup has worked so well for GGC that it’s currently being rolled out nationwide in a single tenancy, across around 250,000 licenses. Crucially it does so in a compartmentalized way, so that users from one Board can’t access another’s data. That keeps the information governance (IG) team happy, according to Finlay. Apart from that, the solution just works.
“We keep an eye on it, but it just churns away in the background,” says Finlay. “Barracuda has also given us the confidence to remove any unused licenses, with the reassurance that if we make a mistake we haven’t lost everything 30 days later.
”That means NHSGGC has crucially been able to manage its Microsoft 365 licenses in the most efficient manner while remaining compliant with internal policies around data retention. After Barracuda is rolled out to support Exchange Online for all 22 NHS Scotland boards, attention will turn to the other 365 products.
“The benefit of having one tenancy is that if we can get the IG team to agree what we’re going to backup next, it should be as simple as going round the Boards one by one,” Finlay concludes.
“Simple is good. Our world is extremely complex, so if you can get something straightforward that works away in the background and doesn’t need a lot of people to look after, what’s not to like?”.
