Sheffield Teaching Hospitals – SDA

EDNX and Cisco deliver a cutting-edge Software Defined Network for Sheffield Teaching Hospitals

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the UK’s largest, busiest, and most successful NHS organisations. They provide a full range of hospital and community services for people in Sheffield, as well as specialist care for patients from other areas.

STH manage five of Yorkshire’s best known teaching hospitals including Northern General and Royal Hallamshire among others. With around 17,000 employees STH is one of the biggest local employers. The Trust’s vision is to be recognised as the best provider of health, clinical research and education in the UK and a strong contributor to the aspiration of Sheffield to be a vibrant and healthy city region.

In late July 2020 in partnership with EDNX and Cisco Advanced Services, the Trust has undertaken a network transformation project based on SD-Access. A key driver for the network refresh project is to replace the existing legacy infrastructure whilst embracing innovative technologies available in the industry today. The Trust was looking for a solution that provided automation, enhanced security, and greater visibility of all endpoints on the network as well as the ability to reduce troubleshooting time. The new network had to be secure, resilient, and optimised for critical applications. This would allow the IT team to focus more on delivering new projects instead of spending substantial portion of time on troubleshooting BAU activities.

Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) is a technology within the Cisco Digital Network Architecture, which is built upon intent-based networking principles. It provides visibility, automation as well as end-to-end segmentation to separate user, device, and application traffic without redesigning the underlying physical network. This technology is a game changer for the Trust allowing substantial improvements on cyber security, mobility and user experience.

The project will ultimately see an upgrade to both wired and wireless networks in all areas capable of supporting the Trust’s program of digital transformation by summer 2024. These upgrades are being supported by a full refresh of the Trust’s core, access, and wireless infrastructure in both Northern General and Royal Hallamshire as well as community sites in the future.

The new network will offer a strong, resilient, and secure platform whilst improving connectivity across the entire estate. It will provide better support for clinical grade systems and services and allow staff to work more efficiently irrespective of their location or access method.

EDNX has played a pivotal role in the design, implementation, and testing stages of the initial proof of concept and continues to support the Trust in the wider rollouts as required.