Mid Essex NHS Trust
Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust (MEHT) employs over 3800 members of staff and provides a full range of essential and community based services from five sites in and around the regions of Chelmsford, Maldon and Braintree. As part of attaining the status of NHS Foundation Trust, a migration to a new IT environment was vital.
The Challenge
An NHS Foundation Trust enjoys greater freedom in managing its affairs, benefitting the needs of the community as a whole. MEHT’s IT environment was originally part of the larger, centralised Essex Shared Services Authority (ESSA), which needed time-consuming, across the board buy-ins from the fellow trusts, in the event of major changes or upgrades. In order to remain within the timeframe they had set themselves to achieve foundation status, MEHT required independence from ESSA and dedicated high-end support to ensure continuous efficiency.
Full IT autonomy would be achieved through two separate migrations and such is the mission-critical nature of 24/7 uninterrupted hospital performance, it was imperative that neither caused any disruption to ESSA’s remaining partners or MEHT’s own staff.
The first migration required extraction from the ESSA domain of MEHT’s Active Directory and the transferral of the accounts into its new domain. The second migration was to involve the safe relocation of two terabytes of data from 2300 Novell data shares to the Windows shared network.
With MEHT providing acute hospital-based services to a population of approximately 360,000 people and the wider reach of ESSA’s other partners; such a complex operation posed very real life-threatening risks. The manual approach was out of the question and what MEHT required was a specialised migration solution to ensure a smooth and, most importantly, 100% secure procedure.
The Solution
SysMicro facilitated both migrations, incorporating solutions that met the concerns of MEHT regarding safety-critical reliability.
Migration Manager and NDS Migrator, for Active Directory and Novell Directory Services respectively, were the tools that SysMicro used to perform the two operations, eliminating the risk factor and alleviating the worries expressed by MEHT.
Migration Manager, an award-winning Active Directory migration solution, simplified the related processes and integrated workflow, from pre-analysis through to setup, migration, resource updating and the post-procedural cleanup. Its capacity to enable coexistence between the already migrated and non-migrated users, ensured work and collaboration continued without interruption.
NDS Migrator allowed centralised access to all the pre- and post-operation processes, allowing for a fast, yet simplified migration from Novell Directory to Active Directory. The ability to schedule tasks and view both the NDS and Activity Directory tree, permitted thorough planning from the outset, resulting in a flawless migration.
Both Migration Manager and NDS Migrator were provided by Quest Software, an IT vendor and trusted partner of SysMicro. Both solutions underwent rigorous tests beforehand to ensure that they would remain infallible throughout. Despite the best efforts of invited Microsoft technicians to break the trial processes, the flexibility of SysMicro’s chosen solutions proved their hardiness and suitability for implementation in the final procedures.
SysMicro carried out both the migration of the Active Directory accounts to the new domain and the movement of data from the Novell Directory, over the course of two weekends, resulting in no downtime or data loss.
The resulting independent IT environment, complete with 24/7 dedicated support, has improved IT efficiency and the ability of MEHT to meet the standards that NHS Foundation Trust status requires.
SysMicro has been fulfilling the IT needs of Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust for five years. They provide all of the third level hardware that supports MEHT’s critical systems, as well as management solutions, infrastructure architecture and ongoing 24/7 support.
