NHS

April 25, 2023

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, 95 percent of the NHS’s staff shifted to remote work almost overnight. As the world’s first and largest single-payer healthcare system in the world, the NHS employs 1.6 million people and provides medical care to more than 60 million UK residents. The NHS needed to allow primary care workers to access patient data on their own devices without the need for expensive VPN connections or buying new hardware—and it needed to do so without any major hiccups or disruptions.

Since time was of the essence, Orange Business, the NHS’s partner through the transition, employed Login Enterprise to validate a prototype that supported line-of-business applications, putting a secure workspace in the cloud.

Satisfy the need for speed

The time to deploy and get the transition right could literally mean life or death. Given the rise of infections around the world and in the UK, the NHS team knew it was essential to come up with some new innovative solutions to enable patient care to continue uninterrupted.

Within two weeks, Orange developed a virtual desktop prototype with NHS line-of-business applications on VMware Horizon Cloud.

Once Orange created a secure connection, workers could log onto the virtual desktop using their own devices, which linked to multi-factor authentication to certify authorized users. Identity management solutions can immensely impact the user experience in the cloud. Login Enterprise’s monitoring capabilities helped verify that users could log in and identify any issues during the process—allowing the Orange and NHS teams to troubleshoot performance issues and optimize the experience to minimize disruption when delivering patient care.

Application compatibility and performance

Legacy NHS applications would also need to work on the new virtual desktops. Using Login Enterprise’s synthetic users and application workloads, validation checks were automated and scaled based on the typical activities of real users to ensure applications worked—and worked within acceptable response times.

After piloting several hospital environments to finetune performance, the VDI solution was delivered and onboarded to the first 1,000 users. Login Enterprise continuously monitored performance. With every change, the team was empowered to determine how user experience was impacted immediately.

To learn more about the NHS used Login Enterprise to balance quality and speed within a compressed timeline, download the full case study.