The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a transformation of the UK’s healthcare system and introduced advancements to strengthen the country’s response for future global health crises.
A pandemic used to be something most people heard on the news or read about from history. In 2020, however, things were different, as the global population was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Everything changed, including government responses across the world.
A new organization, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), launched and was immediately tasked with the largest responsibilities the country had faced in generations, from managing the spread of a virus capable of killing millions to ensuring that vaccines were available to the entire population.
The circumstances were hardly ideal, but the processes developed, infrastructure was built, and lessons were learned while the management of the virus has since made the UK—and the world—a safer place.
The need for digital infrastructure
Building an effective digital infrastructure for the response to COVID-19 was essential for the UKHSA to succeed. The UK government’s “Cloud First” policy led to the development of a multi-cloud platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
The UKHSA Cloud now underpins digital transformation across UK health services, but the variable costs typically associated with cloud spend were initially a problem. What many organizations embrace as a flexible solution was, for UKHSA, low on predictability and high on unexpected variation and lack of control. The organization needed a way to simplify costs while maintaining secure access.
The solution to this was investing in VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth (formerly CloudHealth by VMware). UKHSA worked with a VMware Professional Services specialist to develop a FinOps framework to customize VMware Aria Cost and incorporate it into the UKHSA Cloud. The result was a powerful solution that delivered critical benefits of managing the platform, while also delivering resource utilization and cost savings for organizations across the UK healthcare sector.
Pinpointing unnecessary spend
VMware Aria Cost is an AI/ML-enabled solution that allows UKHSA to demonstrate how it is managing cloud costs and improving visibility across the organization. For a private business, this is highly desirable, but for an organization that responds to the UK government, it is essential.
UKHSA can now pinpoint unnecessary spending. The early success identified by UKHSA Cloud and VMware Aria Cost meant the platform was effectively cost-neutral. Identifying USD $4,500 in “zombie” assets within a month, followed by the tagging of over 1,500 untagged assets, were significant successes that would otherwise have taken years to achieve. These were dwarfed, however, by the USD $120,000 in saved costs—described to be a “real-time bank statement.”
In terms of managing the costs of UKHSA Cloud itself, VMware Aria Cost enables UKHSA to track direct and indirect costs and key usage and configuration characteristics. And as these insights and usage volumes grow, UKHSA is increasingly well positioned to negotiate favorable rates with cloud providers, and so the savings grow further.
Extending cloud resources to new initiatives
Adopting VMware Aria Cost was a critical factor in the evolution of UKHSA. What began as a custom-built test, contact tracing and vaccination scheduling solution has now become a comprehensive cloud services platform that manages a broad spectrum of initiatives and programs.
The success has allowed UKHSA to extend cloud resources to other agencies and support a variety of future healthcare use cases across the NHS. Looking ahead, this also acts as a valuable proof of concept for other government agencies and organizations. Most importantly of all, the UK is prepared for the next challenge, whatever, wherever, and whenever it may be.
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