Transforming end user support for more than 4,000 NHS staff
Solent NHS Trust offers a growing range of community and mental health services across Southampton, Portsmouth, and parts of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
Having previously outsourced their end user support to the same provider for more than twelve years, Solent made the decision to revamp this entire function, considering ongoing issues around data visibility, unpredictable pricing, and lack of integration between different aspects of the service. The goal for this project would be to deliver seamless IT support services for more than 4,000 end users across Solent's full range of sites, while simultaneously reducing costs and conducting a full device refresh.
It was decided that the new support function would be divided amongst several technology partners, in order to take full advantage of their individual capabilities. Throughout the tender process, Exponential-e's deep commitment to digital transformation in healthcare and willingness to work closely with Solent's own teams to develop a tailored solution in response to the most specific requirements made them a clear stand-out. As a result, they were selected as Solent's sole technology partner for network and end user support.
The first areas of the contact went live in December 2022, after several months of close collaboration with Solent's own team to ensure a smooth transition, following the switch-off of the incumbent supplier's services in March of that year. This required a considerable amount of hands-on support, including out of hours, to ensure more than 4,000 staff were able to retain access to the Citrix VPN, avoiding any disruption to day-to-day operations.
As part of a wider hardware refresh, more than 4,000 new laptops were provisioned over the course of ten weeks, replacing much of the legacy technology that was still in use, including across several remote sites. An end user survey was conducted to help maximise adoption and ensure any opportunities for improvement could be identified and acted upon. With more than 2,000 responses, this provided Exponential-e with a rich pool of actionable data with which to design and optimise the new support operation.
Critical to the success of the new support function was the design and implementation of a robust IT Service Management platform, powered by ServiceNow®. By creating a domain separated instance within Exponential-e's managed service offering, Solent would not need to design and deploy the new ITSM platform from scratch, ensuring it would be ready to use on designated go-live date. At the same time, moving the function from CAPEX to OPEX allowed for greater cost control, while minimising the initial expenditure.
In order to meet Solent's specific requirements for their ticketing system, this solution was based on the Exponential-e's defined ITIL-aligned standards and service workflows, with an agreed scope for further customisation and hands-on support from Exponential-e's technical specialists included in the contract. The resulting platform combining the advantages of a proven, well-established solution with the highest levels of control and flexibility in terms of the final implementation and its ongoing development.
Following a successful transition to the new end user support function and the rollout of the ITSM platform, Exponential-e have continued to develop the operation in direct response to Solent's evolving requirements, ensuring business-critical issues can be resolved as quickly as possible. This has included recruiting extra service desk personnel, and implementing out-of-hours cover, while expanding the team's roaming tech hub to ensure all sites are properly supported. Time-to-resolution has been set out in robust SLAs and KPIs, with specific processes and escalations in place to manage high-impact events, and dedicated response engineers in place.
To optimise the efficiency and accessibility of service desk agents, Exponential-e designed and implemented an appointment-based system, ensuring staff who required hands-on IT support could access it as quickly as possible. This has since helped reduced walk-ins for IT-related issues from around 600 per month to less than 30.
The months of work put into establishing this foundation has since allowed Solent and Exponential-e to establish a culture of ongoing improvement, driven by direct collaboration daily, with Exponential-e now established as a trusted partner.
Every point of contact with end user support is tracked and monitored, and end users can provide real-time feedback on their experiences. This has resulted in 75% of tickets logged being resolved at the first point of contact, which, in turn, raised end user support's NPS score from 57, in the first live month of operations, to 90, with a 20% increase in users willing to offer feedback. Since then, the team has built on this success, recently hitting the milestone of more than 5,000 gold ratings.
This partnership continues to evolve, with ongoing collaboration between teams from both organisations ensuring IT can continue to play a key role in delivering world-class service quality to citizens across every region in which Solent is active.
Exponential-e's support and expertise has transformed the way IT is viewed across our organisation, with staff across all our sites making active use of the available tools and systems in every aspect of their work. The speed with which any issues have been resolved, and the team's willingness to think outside the box – particularly when it came to rolling out the new ITSM platform – have more than fulfilled our initial goals for network and end user support, with ample opportunities for further improvement.
Dawn Day, Head of Digital Delivery, Solent NHS Trust
It's time for the public sector to have its own digital revolution
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is rapidly establishing itself as the solution of choice for the next generation of enterprise networks, where optimal control, visibility, and scalability are essential. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, the SASE market experienced a 23% surge, as more and more organisations began taking advantage of its capabilities.
On the morning of 12th September 2024, the UK Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, pinpointed three 'big shifts' that would be required to transform the NHS:
Although the rise in money criminals have generated through ransomware has risen by what may appear to be a small percentage amount (approximately 2% from US $449.1 million to US $459.8 million), this is in spite of disruption caused to ransomware-as-a-service operations such as LockBit and ALPHV/BlackCat by law enforcement agencies.
The figures for the first half of 2024 include the US $75 million reportedly paid to the Dark Angels ransomware gang by an undisclosed Fortune 50 company, in what was believed to be the largest ever single ransom payment made since records began.
The ballooning size of maximum ransom payments represents a 96% year-on-year growth from 2023, and a 335% increase from the maximum payment made in 2022.
Chainalysis's research reveals that the median ransom payment made in response to the most severe ransomware has rocketed from just under US $200,000 in early 2023 to US $1.5 million by mid-June 2024.
The researchers believe that this 7.9x increase in the typical size of ransom payment (a nearly 1200x rise since the start of 2021) suggests that larger businesses and critical infrastructure providers considered more likely to agree to make higher payments due to their greater access to funds and the more significant impact of downtime.
Against this backdrop, the study claims that ransomware victims are giving in to extortion demands less often. As it explains:
Posts to ransomware leak sites as a measure of ransomware incidents have increased YoY by 10%, something we would expect to see if more victims were being compromised. However, total ransomware payment events as measured on-chain have declined YoY by 27.29%. Reading these two trends in tandem suggests that while attacks might be up so far this year, payment rates are down YoY. This is a positive sign for the ecosystem signalling that perhaps victims are better prepared, negating the need to pay.
In short, ensuring that your organisation had prepared to respond to a ransomware attack is essential.
Many organisations underestimate the importance of having a robust incident response plan. But knowing how to respond, especially in those critical first 48 hours after a cyber attack, can be critical.
Do you worry your company won't know how to recover after a cyber attack? Has your business just been hit by ransomware and you're wondering what to do?
There's still hope.
Don't make the mistake of believing that your organisation will never be targeted. The right approach is to take proactive measures in advance - as it's not a case of whether your business will suffer the likes of a ransomware attack but when.
Make sure to read Exponential-e's step-by-step guide on ransomware remediation.
Organisations' demands of their IT infrastructure continue to evolve at an unprecedented rate, with the drive for growth and innovation needing to be balanced against the need to maintain cost control, visibility, and - crucially, cyber security. Numerous solutions have emerged in response to these challenges, but one of the most pivotal questions organisations must answer is whether to host their critical data and applications on-site, or in the Cloud.
Let's explore the respective advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, and then consider whether the increasing sophistication of modern workloads demand a new approach...
Digital transformation continues to pick up pace across the financial sector. However, in spite of the potential benefits on offer, many insurance firms continue to lag behind their peers in terms of their overall digital maturity.
What's happened?
Recorded Future has reports that the British Government is proposing sweeping change in its approach to ransomware attacks.
Do you know Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev?
If you do, there's a chance that you might well on the way to receiving a reward of up to $10 million.
Law enforcement agencies across the US, UK, and Australia have named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the mastermind behind the notorious LockBit ransomware group, estimated to have extorted $500 million from companies worldwide.
The Ambulance Radio Programme (ARP) delivers mission-critical communication and mobilisation technologies to ensure effective communication between Ambulance Service Trusts, the NHS, and other emergency responders across the UK.
The successful delivery of emergency services depends on critical platforms being always on and always available, ensuring citizens in the most remote areas can always make contact and receive aid as quickly as possible. With even the smallest periods of downtime potentially costing lives, ARP demands the highest standards of performance and resilience from its underlying connectivity, with rigorous SLAs in place to ensure these targets are met.
In order to further optimise the availability of emergency services across the UK, there are currently two major programmes being implemented by ARP across the UK. The Control Room Solution (CRS), which is utilised by ambulance services across England and Scotland, ensuring critical communications between the emergency control room dispatchers and operational crews are completely seamless. The Mobile Data & Vehicle Solution (MDVS) will replace legacy communications equipment for the English and Welsh Ambulance Service Trusts.
Both programmes required a secure, resilient, and highly available IT infrastructure as the underlying foundation, for which ARP selected the Exponential-e Group - encompassing Exponential-e, Vysiion, and Xpertex - as their trusted technology partner.
The programme has lots of moving parts, and a lot of key users and stakeholders - all with unique needs and ways of working. ARP needed a team, processes, and technologies which could be used to create a common service, capable of integrating with each Ambulance Trust and user organisation.
Mathew Baker, IT Service Manager, ARP
The Exponential-e Group has worked closely with ARP for a number of years, beginning with the CNAM project, which Vysiion successfully executed before its acquisition by the Group. Here, multiple critical platforms that were previously managed on a regional basis, with discrete infrastructure and applications run independently by each Trust across England and Wales, were fully centralised in ARP's data centres, including both CRS and MDVS. A whole new network was utilised as the foundation, connecting the centralised ARP control room applications to each regional Trust's control rooms. This highly resilient network infrastructure was designed to maintain the highest levels of uptime and availability across all regions, optimising the delivery of critical services.
ARP would later build on these early successes, engaging the wider Exponential-e Group as its requirements evolved. Exponential-e later delivered a fully centralised, UK-based service desk, available 24 / 7, and continues to work with ARP's own teams to identify new opportunities for service improvements and process optimisation.
Over the course of several years, the partnership between ARP and the Exponential-e Group has continued to evolve and is now in a strong position to take on further challenges. A particular focus is the digitisation of processes and onboarding of multiple new solutions to further optimise the availability and delivery of emergency services nationwide.
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