The Isle of Wight NHS Trust has partnered with Cinos to provide and manage its new telephony and Unified Communications (UC) solution.
Cinos says the new Cisco-powered sovereign UC telephony service, delivered from the Cinos Cloud, will provide the Trust with ‘a secure and reliable service that delivers the flexibility and robustness needed to adopt new hybrid working practices’.
Cinos explained: “With certain elements of its existing UC platform reaching end of life, the Trust is looking to update its unified communications infrastructure to enable new working and service delivery practices.” Cinos says it will support the Trust to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy that provides a robust cloud service, while still maintaining a small footprint of services on site. Due to the Trust’s island location, this approach adds an extra layer of resilience to ensure ‘always-on communications’ in the event of any interruption to the network.
To be utilised by the Trust’s 3,900 employees, the service will ‘seamlessly integrate’ with Microsoft Teams in line with the NHS’s wider adoption strategy. With the Cisco Powered UC platform in place, users will be able to make and receive calls from any location under one single collaboration application, while benefiting from the reliability of a fully featured hybrid cloud UC platform that provides additional calling services.
Jake Gully, Digital Operations manager at The Isle of Wight NHS Trust, said: “With the increasing need to support our staff in adopting hybrid working practices, and the ability to work from anywhere, we recognised the importance of introducing a new telephony and UC solution for the wider Trust. Simplifying the management of our telephony technology will also help to free up the Digital team to spend more time on priorities such as core infrastructure and the user experience.
“Alongside our hybrid approach to telephony, we recognised that we needed help with building resilience into our infrastructure. With Cinos’s expertise in this area and sector, we look forward to working together on the project and fully embedding the new solution as part of our ongoing service.”
To ensure end-user familiarity, the existing call recording and operator console will be upgraded and retained as part of the solution – not only allowing the Trust to retain its licensing investments, but also enabling a smoother migration path, as user training will not be required for these elements during the on-boarding process.
