Te Whatu Ora building national public cloud platforms

eHealthNews.nz: Infrastructure

Te Whatu Ora building national public cloud platforms

Sunday, 15 October 2023

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Te Whatu Ora national hybrid multi-cloud programme has been allocated $4.55 million to build national cloud platforms on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) by 2024.

James Allison, director of digital enterprise services, says AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud services have the scale and security required to host health applications and services that can improve workflow for clinicians and support consumers by making it easier to share information across Aotearoa New Zealand.

Currently, up to 80 percent of Te Whatu Ora applications and services are on-premise.

Allison says the hybrid multi-cloud programme “is creating the landing zones allowing us to shift the dial to include private cloud and public cloud capabilities, aligned to government strategy.”

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Hybrid multi-cloud is a mixed computing, storage, and services environment made up of on-premise, private and public cloud services. Te Whatu Ora is working with both Amazon and Microsoft to enable access to their enterprise grade public cloud offerings.

The organisation says there is also an important role for local providers in other areas of the cloud programme, such as testing, design, advice, and support.

“Our hybrid multi-cloud programme is about creating the foundational platform for us to harmonise our activities and manage our technical debt challenges,” Allison says.

“It is preparing enterprise-class spaces that will enable us to progressively transition our applications”.

Allison adds that everything is being designed to be able to move data and workloads back to New Zealand when public cloud data centres are built locally. Both Amazon and Microsoft have announced plans for data centres in New Zealand.

“By the end of this year we will have those enhancements completed to both platforms and we will merge other Amazon and Microsoft tenants onto these enterprise platforms,” he says.

“This is an opportunity to rationalise, consolidate and get to a level of scale that supports care delivery.”

Te Whatu Ora interim central region data and digital lead Steve Miller says there are already multiple workloads on both Amazon and Microsoft Azure, such as the Central region’s patient administration system, which recently moved to the cloud.

Te Whatu Ora now has a national view of all the former 29 entities’ environments and is using a visualisation tool to view a real time dashboard of the whole environment.

“This supports our planning around what we start to transition and modernise as part of the process,” Miller explains.

He says the health system already makes extensive use of public cloud capability, which has been developed to make it fit for purpose for the entire sector.

“We are building on our existing work and adding more features. This gives us a great chance to adopt new technology platforms and work methods.”