From the very late 1990’s up until the time I retired, I worked in an office. I chose a different career path that involved sitting in front of a computer doing things with other computers and servers for the British Healthcare system: the NHS.
Recently in the news, there have been reports of IT systems at hospitals being hacked, data has been stolen and patient information sold.
I worked for the British Healthcare system (the NHS) for over 23 years in the IT Department.
Let me relate my experience of hospital and NHS IT systems in general… and I’ll do that across six posts: because it’s a big old complex set of systems and interactions.
Six posts:
The first post covers finance. The NHS is a publicly funded service and it’s important to understand (at least a high level) where the money comes from and how it’s spent. It’s also important to understand where it’s spent and by whom.
The second post covers the evolution of security and patching in the NHS. Over the course of 23 years, a lot has changed in terms of computer and data security, this is the brief outline of how the IT Department kept up!
The third post covers users and user management. How they’re managed, what do we do with administrators and how that’s all audited.
The fourth post covers backups and virtual servers. What are they and what do they do for the user. Who buys them?
The fifth post covers user education and that other virus: Covid-19.
The sixth (and final) post covers the actual subject of all this lot: IT systems in hospitals and the recent breaches.
To summarise:
Across these six posts, I’m hoping that the reader will get a view of the operations within an NHS IT department. I don’t think we were that typical, but we were lucky enough to be able to implement measures to avoid any large data breaches, ransomware or major outages caused by an external influence. These posts are written to provide some insight into the scope and complexity of the computer systems in hospitals and other NHS Trusts.
What we’re going to cover…
(Post 1) How an IT Department is Financed in the NHS
(Post 2) Windows updates
(Post 2) Network security
(Post 2) User device security
(Post 3) Account security
(Post 3) User account management
(Post 3) The auditors
(Post 3) Sysadmins
(Post 4) Backups
(Post 4) Physical vs virtual servers
(Post 5) Security? What’s that?
(Post 5) Education, education, education.
(Post 5) I’ve been scammed!
(Post 5) Covid-19
(Post 6) Are we getting to the point yet?
(Post 6) WannaCry
(Post 6) The WannaCry fallout
(Post 6) The recent breaches