Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust is a key provider of healthcare services to communities in Salisbury and the surrounding area and provides a wide range of specialist care services for patients across southern England.

• A modern Microsoft cloud environment running the latest versions.
  
• Greater flexibility, scalability and improved management and security.

In 2019, Salisbury ran a procurement to find an external partner. They chose Core after we demonstrated how we could approach the requirement in a way that minimised risk and cost to the Trust, and shared our expertise and experience delivering similar projects. “Core were chosen as part of a competitive tender”, explains Jon Arnold, Technical Implementation Manager at Salisbury NHS Trust. “Their proposal was the most comprehensive.”

The project was initially scoped to cover a range of services including Active Directory, Azure IaaS, Enterprise Mobility and Security, System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) and Windows 10. Core were tasked with designing and deploying new environments in each case, and where appropriate, supporting the migration of users from the legacy platforms to newly deployed platforms.

A Discovery Workshop was completed to understand and agree the Trust’s desired outcomes and to map requirements for a successful project. The team completed a series of designs for each environment starting with high-level designs to make sure the customer objectives were fully realised, followed by low-level designs with full detail on how each service would be configured and deployed.

Test accounts were used to confirm all services worked as expected in all planned scenarios. A pilot stage followed, with a percentage of users taken into the new environment to complete user acceptance testing (UAT).

The project delivered Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust a new set of modern environments running the latest versions of Microsoft technology which give greater flexibility, scalability and improved management and security.

“The project is near completion, the key elements are delivered and in operation”, says Jon. “When any integration issues arose, Core worked with the local team to overcome these. Core have been flexible with working approaches and recognised the challenges of a project being delivered in the midst of a pandemic”, he continues.

The solutions were configured in line with best practices to ensure they meet all organisational and compliance requirements. “The Core consultants have been knowledgeable and flexible. Core have been open to constructive feedback and have openly discussed areas for improvement and worked to address these.”, Jon says. “We have a new and operational Microsoft environment that is well documented and will be supportable into the future.”