The Health Research Authority

About the Health Research Authority

The Health Research Authority (HRA) was established in December 2011 to promote and protect the interests of patients in health research and to streamline the regulation of research. Their aim, with the help of partners, is to make the UK a great place to carry out health research, to build confidence and participation in health research and so improve the nation’s health. The HRA provides a number of key operational IT systems to underpin its role as a regulator within the health research community.

The Challenge

During 2017, the HRA’s arrangements for its infrastructure hosting were coming to an end. Given the pressing business need for an alternative arrangement, the HRA and the Department of Health undertook a market appraisal to source a technology partner, to operate within Crown Hosting’s premises, that could meet a number of requirements, including more flexible commercial terms, a highly secure solution and responsive support services to incorporate value-added features around performance monitoring and disaster recovery. The aim was to deliver a more secure, cost-effective solution without compromising on the quality of service. Vysiion was chosen as the preferred technology partner due to their ability to understand the high-level brief and present a detailed solution which met the requirements whilst at the same time introducing additional security features and benefits. They also had a deep understanding of the Crown Hosting framework, had extensive experience of working with the Crown Hosting team and were able to provide a unique end to end service which covered migration of the entire server estate through to providing a 24/7/365, on-site managed service wrap, which offered good value for money.

The Solution

Deploying infrastructure into the Crown Hosting data centre and working with Vysiion has given the HRA the desired service flexibility and cost savings.

The partnership between the HRA and Vysiion is a perfect example of how Vysiion can support public sector organisations wanting to move into the Crown Hosting data centre. The two organisations are working well with regular scheduled service review meetings to ensure Vysiion continues to deliver a first-class service and that lines of communication are open, clear, and effective.

What’s even more positive about all this is the seamless way in which Vysiion and BGO Software, have worked together and developed such a great partnership, something that is becoming all the more important across the sector with many services being outsourced to third parties. As a result, plans are already in place to expand the scope of the partnership to include a full DR solution.