NHS Trust uses upgraded VPN to sell cloud services

A south London NHS Trust has cut costs and generated new revenue thanks to a recent network upgrade

The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has made "tens of thousands of pounds" from acting as a cloud provider to an unnamed Primary Care Trust (PCT).

The Trust was able to provide the service after it installed a metropolitan Ethernet VPN network from Virgin Media two years ago. The Trust was unwilling to say how much it spent on the network upgrade.

The Ethernet VPN meant bandwidth across the Trust was significantly increased, from 100Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s in the core, and from 2Mbit/s to 10Mbit/s and 10Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s at different parts of the edge of the network.

The Virgin Media network replaced an MPLS network that had been provided by Cable & Wireless.

The Trust comprises 5,000 staff, and the network caters to these staff and an additional 2,800 users from public sector bodies including social services and the Institute of Psychiatry. The network runs over 85 sites.

The Trust was able to host the PCT's research database because it has the requisite bandwidth and is hosted in an NHS Trust controlled governance environment, which differentiates it from a more generic cloud provider.

The increase in bandwidth has also enabled the Trust to move to a digital patient records system; it also provides videoconferencing (with additional infrastructure from Cisco and Tandberg); voice over IP with technology from Mitel, and networked door security using the XPlan 400 from ACS.

Ricky Mackennon, deputy director of ICT and business development for South London and Maudsley, said: "The investment we made in our network was part of a strategy upgrade at the time that has allowed us to in-source and make additional money."

The trust has seen a return on the investment as a result of a reduction in travel and telecoms costs and income from the hosted solution.

The network complies with Public Sector Network standards.

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust provides mental health and substance misuse services for people living in the London boroughs of Croydon, Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham.