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University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust

University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust delivers lifesaving care 24/7 for over two decades with Commvault

Leading NHS Trust uses Commvault® Cloud Backup and Recovery to enable always-on access to key medical systems and data, even if disaster strikes.

Immutable backup protection enabled

Mission-critical data always accessible

Cyber resilience continuously maintained

20+ Years

Trusted partnership with Commvault protecting critical healthcare data across five data centers

120TB

Total protected data volume supporting over 800 servers delivering care to 2+ million patients

<1 Hour

Recovery point objective ensures minimal data loss and rapid restoration of vital systems

Challenge

Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting National Health Service IT systems.
Doctors and clinicians require quick access to medical data and applications to deliver rapid and effective life-saving care.
Rising patient numbers and growing data volumes increase pressure on IT processes and systems.

Solution

Commvault® Cloud Backup and Recovery protects the Trust’s mission-critical data and applications.
Versatile data transfer capabilities automatically feed vital information into the Trust’s performance analysis tools.

Results

One hour recovery point objective minimizes the risk of data loss during a disaster event.
Immutable backups give the Trust full confidence in its ability to restore data and systems into production environments.
Automatic system updates help the Trust keep pace with evolving cyberthreats.

DELIVERING WORLD-CLASS HEALTHCARE

University Hospitals Plymouth National Health Service Trust provides community and social care, mental health, acute and specialist care to more than 2 million people. Technology plays a central role in service delivery, from enabling collaboration between clinicians, through tracking patient medical records, to supporting operational and financial planning. Unfortunately, mission-critical systems like these are prime targets for cybercriminals, who have ramped up attacks to unprecedented levels.

Protecting the systems, data, and applications that underpin care services is the top priority of Lucy Scott, Principal Systems Engineer at the Trust. “We have over 120 terabytes of data as well as 100 physical and 700 virtual servers,” explains Lucy Scott. “If any of these core systems went offline due to a natural disaster or cyberattack, it would severely impact patient services and make it much harder for clinicians to coordinate care. Because of this, we focus our efforts on ensuring that we have rock-solid cyber resiliency processes in place and that we can always recover our data quickly if needed.”

As a publicly funded institution, regulators expect the Trust to prove that it is consistently delivering the highest possible standard of care and providing value for taxpayers. Scott comments: “Our data volumes grow yearly, and cybercriminals are always working to develop more sophisticated and pernicious attacks. Not only do we need to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape and meet growing data volumes, but we must also make sure that we always achieve these goals in the most cost-effective way possible.”

Building on 20 Years of Partnership

The Trust has used Commvault® Cloud Backup & Recovery for two decades to protect its core data and applications. “We regularly research the market to determine the best value and features for our cyber resiliency investments,” says Lucy Scott. “Commvault consistently comes out on top for cost efficiency and its powerful capabilities. Furthermore, we have run Commvault Cloud on five different data centers over the years, and it has always performed very well in all environments.”

Deployed on-premises, Commvault Cloud backs up all of the Trust’s core data and systems—including clinician- and patient-facing applications alongside solutions to support operational and financial planning. “One of the great things about Commvault Cloud is that it is intuitive and simple for new hires to get to grips with,” comments Lucy Scott. “We especially like that we can recover whole servers or individual files with just a few clicks and easily validate the integrity of our backups from within Commvault Cloud.”

In addition to backing up and recovering key systems, the Trust also uses Commvault Cloud to support performance reporting. “We also use Commvault Cloud to back up our mission-critical SQL databases, and we use the solution to feed synchronized copies of these databases into a data warehouse dedicated to analytics. We then interrogate this data to track whether the Trust meets key service, safety, and quality levels. Commvault Cloud’s ability to support this unique use case is a testament to its versatility. We’ve used the solution to support performance analysis capabilities for many years, and our regulators appreciate the detailed level of visibility it enables us to provide.”

Protecting Frontline Patient Services

With Commvault Cloud at the heart of its cyber resilience strategy, University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust can quickly recover data in the event of downtime and limit the disruption that a cyberattack could cause to patient services.

“We use Commvault Cloud to create an immutable copy of our core data and applications,” explains Lucy Scott. “In the improbable event that bad actors could delete, corrupt, or encrypt our data, we know we have an untouched copy that will enable us to restore systems rapidly and easily. Most importantly, we can verify that we would be able to use that data in a production environment to support the day-to-day running of the hospital. This greatly reduces the disruption a cyberattack could cause to frontline care.”

Commvault Cloud also helps minimize the impact of unplanned downtime with regular, frequent data snapshots. “We’ve set up a 1-hour recovery point objective with Commvault Cloud. Hospital services move fast, and clinicians use multiple systems to administer care and record patient progress throughout the day, Commvault protects this vital data and gives us the ability to recover it quickly if needed.”

Over two decades, Commvault has helped the Trust recover its systems when issues have occurred. “Our systems run smoothly, and unplanned downtime doesn’t happen very often,” says Lucy Scott. “On the rare occasion that a system has encountered an issue, we have always been able to restore a clean, fully-functioning version from Commvault Cloud and move it into production rapidly. What’s more, service packs and updates from Commvault are automatically installed on our instance of Commvault Cloud, giving us access to the latest features and security updates. The Commvault solution gives us added confidence to stay ahead of evolving cyber threats and protect our data, no matter what.”