Nuffield Health
Moving a Nation with Node4’s Cloud-First Transformation
The Client
Nuffield Health is the UK’s largest healthcare charity. With no shareholders, every penny goes back into its mission to build a healthier nation. That mission plays out across 31 award-winning hospitals, 113 fitness and wellbeing clubs, healthcare clinics, and over 200 workplace wellbeing services.
The charity also runs flagship programmes for children with cystic fibrosis, supports the world’s largest research project into exercise and prostate cancer recovery, and partners with schools to deliver free health and wellbeing programmes. These services are accessed and supported through the charity’s main website.
Needing to resolve this rapidly, we asked Microsoft if they could assist us. Microsoft came back with just one recommendation, Node4. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Challenge
Nuffield Health’s website was hosted on a managed physical platform that couldn’t keep up with peak demand. The IT team had started using Microsoft Azure for development and data exchange, and saw the potential to migrate nuffieldhealth.com to the cloud. They needed a solution that would reduce costs, improve performance, and support the creation of new digital services. Microsoft recommended Node4.
“Needing to resolve this rapidly, we asked Microsoft if they could assist us. Microsoft came back with just one recommendation — Node4. The rest, as they say, is history.” — Dave Ankers, IT Strategy and Delivery Director, Nuffield Health
The Solution
We worked closely with Nuffield Health’s IT team to plan and deliver a seamless Azure migration. This wasn’t just a lift-and-shift. We re-architected and optimised the website to make full use of Azure’s infrastructure and services. Every digital asset and application was catalogued to avoid disruption. Dry runs were carried out before the final cutover, which happened overnight, unnoticed by users.
“I don’t want to sound flippant,” said Dave Ankers, “but the most positive thing I can say is that no one outside my department — say, for example, a director of one of our hospitals — noticed the switch over.”
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The Results
The migration delivered immediate and lasting benefits:
- 50% reduction in storage costs year-on-year
- 50% reduction in support bills
- Avoided a £500,000 hardware refresh
- Enabled scalable cloud resources to meet peak demand
- Supported the launch of Nuffield Health 24/7, a free digital fitness platform
- Enabled access to the Schools Wellbeing programme for teachers
“For the first time, it feels like our infrastructure really enables digital delivery, rather than holding it back — and that’s a wonderful feeling!” — Dave Ankers
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The Node4 Difference
We helped Nuffield Health unlock the full potential of Azure, giving their developers the tools to innovate, and their users the reliability they expect. Our DevOps approach meant we understood how their team worked and built the infrastructure to support them. Today, Nuffield Health’s digital services are more resilient, scalable and cost-effective, ready to grow with the charity’s ambitions.