Case Study
Taking Azure And Scalability To A New Level
How revx helped The Christie NHS Foundation Trust re-architect and modernise their Azure infrastructure to support a nationally accessible proton beam therapy referral platform.
The Client
About The Christie NHS Foundation Trust
The Christie is an NHS Foundation Trust specialises in the treatment, care, and research of cancer. As well as being the largest single-site cancer centre in Europe, it is also the first UK centre to be officially accredited as a comprehensive cancer centre by the Organisation of European Cancer Institutes.
The Christie became the first NHS centre to provide Proton Beam Therapy (PBT), a form of radiotherapy that allows for stronger and more effective cancer treatment with greater accuracy and fewer side effects than traditional radiotherapy.
Europe
Largest Single-Site Cancer Centre
1st
UK PBT Provider
NHS
Foundation Trust
At A Glance
Challenge, solution, outcome.
A summary of what The Christie faced, how revx approached it, and the measurable results delivered.
Challenges
The Problem
- Nationally accessible solution required
- Increased traffic and user base size to be accommodated for
Solution
How We Solved It
- Review of the current architecture
- Modernisation of the existing Azure Architecture
- Adoption of containerisation and Infrastructure as Code
Benefits
What Was Achieved
- Improved stability and security, reduced cost, and future proofed to support a rich roadmap.
- One team to engage, discuss user and service pain points, and a consistent vision to execution.
Client Testimonial
revx's approach was organised and transparent, the team went above and beyond to understand and deliver a solution that not only met but exceeded our requirements.
Alex McNair
Enterprise Architect
PBT Referral Portal
A national cloud solution.
The team at The Christie were given the responsibility by NHS England to develop a national cloud solution that would allow other care providers to refer patients for proton beam therapy. The referral application initially supported a small number of users but needed scaling as more care providers in England came online. The vision for the digital referral solution was to support the increased traffic and to support the onboarding of other hospitals providing proton beam therapy.
University College of London Hospital (UCLH) became the second leading provider of this therapy and used the same solution for patient referrals in and around Greater London. It is predicted that this referral solution will go on to play a key role in allowing national health care providers to refer patients to any hospitals that will provide proton beam therapy.
Partnership
Building the right team.
The digital team at The Christie created a robust solution that met the requirements but lacked the necessary in-house DevOps and Public Cloud skills to take full advantage of Azure to architect and implement a forward-looking solution that met the NHS England vision.
In partnership with revx, The Christie engineering team have developed an impressive solution to support the increasing referral requirements. It has led to the creation of a scalable, secure, and cost-efficient solution built upon an agile Azure infrastructure that will enable needs to be met on unprecedent scale and avoid any future scalability issues, whilst also addressing key security concerns; data privacy to protect patient information, and defence against possible malware attacks and OWASP vulnerabilities.
The revx Solution
Re-architecting Azure infrastructure.
After a comprehensive review of the current architecture, revx's solution was to re-architect and modernize the underlying Azure infrastructure, enhance the micro services architecture, adopt containerization, and make full use of the Azure cloud. This would be achieved making use of Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform, as per industry best practice.
Based on revx's recommendation, containerisation was implemented to ensure easy scaling and to meet current and future demands. This also allowed for better lifecycle management which in turn provides future agility to The Christie team in responding to change and adding new capabilities.
revx also implemented a new security design using Azure native services that resulted in the replacement of costly and restrictive licensed technologies. By using Azure native services that scale on demand, it not only provided a reduction in operational expenditure via removal of always-on infrastructure, but also added elasticity for scalability when demand peaks and save cost when usage is low.
Key Azure Services Used
Azure Application Gateway (WAF), SQL Server, Azure App Services, Azure Container Registry, Storage Accounts, Azure Key Vault, Vnet Integration, Private Endpoints.
Approach
Collaborative, transparent delivery.
revx worked closely with The Christie team from day one in a collaborative manner. After reviewing the existing architecture, revx produced a comprehensive plan and governance structure aligned with the requirements and expectations of The Christie.
During the development phase, weekly progress meetings were held to keep all stakeholder appraised of progress. revx provided expert Azure guidance that allowed for complex topics to be easily understood and decisions made easily relating to Azure services, security, and cost.
revx not only supported The Christie team until the implementation phase was complete, but also worked closely with the internal teams during the transition phase, providing detailed handover documents and team training sessions. This ensured that competency was created in The Christie teams, and that they were able to support the new design moving forward.
Benefits
Stability, security, and scalability.
revx's in-depth knowledge of digital modernization, DevOps, and Cloud engineering meant that The Christie team had access to one team to engage, discuss user and service pain points, and a consistent vision to execution.
The Christie received a fully rebuilt solution that improved stability and security, reduced cost, and future proofed to support a rich roadmap. Furthermore, The Christie received implementation and knowledge handover support to build internal competency to get the team to a point where application support could be provided internally without 3rd party reliance.
The new application met all pre-project requirements, providing the stability, scalability, maintainability, security, and integration that were crucial to The Christie team.
Outcome
The Christie received a scalable, secure, and cost-efficient Azure solution with full knowledge transfer — enabling the internal team to independently support the platform moving forward.
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