Managed services specialist and vanguard Stage 2 compliant HSCN CN-SP Redcentric has announced that is now able to deliver Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) access to public sector customers of the Crown Hosting Service.

The move follows significant investment in physical space, equipment and connectivity which will see Redcentric’s network connect into two geographically diverse Crown Hosting data centre locations to enable the seamless delivery of HSCN access to by March 2018.

The Crown Hosting Framework operates under the GDS Technology Code of Practice which is a cross government agreed standard to build and buy better technology. CHDC is an integral part of the government’s cloud first strategy operating as a JV with the Cabinet Office.

Crown Hosting is a single supplier digital framework with services provided by CHDC Ltd competed under OJEU regulations providing the UK Public Sector with their secure, hyper connected, sustainable and energy efficient colocation campuses. A platform where a local NHS provider or commissioner can get the same infrastructure and price as the biggest UK public sector departments. The framework has no lock in and works as a pivot into the ‘cloud’. The NHS now has a low-cost way of supporting and maintaining legacy apps and infrastructure while grappling with the challenge of embarking on the long term transformation task.

Stephen Hall, CHDC CEO, “‘I am delighted that HSCN is now connected to all the CH data centres. CHDC supports the HSCN programme which will deliver the infrastructure and services to enable the wider integration of health and social care. HSCN will deliver standardised, interoperable, better, faster and cheaper connectivity services to health and social care providers and CHDC are ready to provide the data centre infrastructure needs of the NHS. CHDC using HSCN provides the robust yet flexible foundation layer upon which transformed health and social care services can be built”

Anton Murphy, Redcentric’s Business Development Manager commented:

“Crown Hosting enables health & care organisations to expediently divest themselves of onerous, inflexible, ageing contracts and accelerate their journey to the Cloud. CHDC’s remit is physical hosting, so Customers additionally have easy access to a choice of complementary CCS Frameworks to similarly accelerate the associated platform design, implementation, environment migration and BAU support.

Department of Health & Social Care Arms’ Length Bodies, NHS Trusts, CSUs and CCGs are looking to benefit soonest at lowest risk from the rapidly realised economic efficiency of Crown Hosting – whether initially preserving existing IP addressing for classic environments that integrate with national applications or ideally transforming to Internet-hosted digital services to facilitate agile onward transition to the Public Cloud. We moved quickly to anticipate the need for HSCN access and arrive at this point where we’re the first to announce our capability in this area.”