NHS in Wales bets big on Microsoft with deal worth nearly half a billion The NHS in Wales has decided to send up to £450 million ($568 million) of taxpayers' hard-earned cash into the bank account of Microsoft via one of its resellers, the public sector organization has confirmed. According to official documents, Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) awarded Trustmarque Solutions the agreement to …
because millions to them are like pennies to us.
Like this £122 million just lost, with no clear outcome on where it went
Betsi Cadwaladr health board: £122m fraud probe launched
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-64068921
And concluded, but with no explanation:
https://forums.theregister.com/post/reply/4810265
There was a Panorama last night about the latest Alzheimer's drugs. They have had a very successful trial and are starting the licensing process. Around 200,000 in the UK would be eligible, but the drug currently costs 20k per patient per year, which is a bit steep but a third of the cost of a care home. To put the drug on the NHS would be 4 Billion/year if they couldn't negotiate a better price, and according to NICE it's not affordable.
But spending 0.5 Billion on an IT system to slurp up medical data for a mere 5% of the UK population (Wales has 3 million out of 70 million people in the UK) is value for money, apparently.
It looks as if it might be prudent to wait a bit for a second generation of those Alzheimer's drugs. It's not just the cost of the drugs themselves, they also need early diagnosis, have to be given by monthly infusion and the patients monitored for potentially fatal side-effects.
Sometimes I think the NHS is more like a bunch of competing fiefdoms rather than one organisation.
You could argue that half a billion over 4 years is a bargain compared to 16 billion quid for drugs over the same time. But that's comparing apples to oranges.
Why can't they use open source software and create in house DC for emails stuff?
Because, like most public bodies, paying for stuff 'in house' comes out of the capital budget - that various successive governments have slashed to the bone. And spending that budget is rigourously controlled, especially when buying from the Government portal.
Cloud services, OTOH, come from 'revenue' budgets (forget what the actual term is - that's what's usually used in a commercial environment) and, as long as you stay below the allowed run-rate, very little of it is tracked or managed. So the money can be spaffed on cloud-hype with very few controls.
I fully expect to read in the coming months about how yet another disastrous IT failure has happened, and that Borkzilla has now joined the ranks of Crapita and Fujitsu in never-ending contract awards that bring nothing but failure.
And, if that is indeed the case, it might be time to ask a question : if it doesn't matter who the provider is to obtain an IT project disaster, maybe the problem is not the provider ?
Making the running of your entire enterprise dependent on a subscription-based lock-in doesn't seem the safest of business strategies. To paraphrase Charles Colson: when they've got you by the balls, the contents of your wallet will inevitably follow.
But of course for public services it's not their money so the excess cost doesn't hurt much.
Almost all corporations (not just Microsoft) are busy offering totally secure functionality even though this requires additional update payments from users. This is very good because they offer a lot of support to their users when the hackers start working to break into their applications and functionality. Imaging how much the corporate income would go down if hacking was stopped - we're seeing hacking increase every year now, and corporate income going up too, hackers seem to be making everyone (except themselves) very wealthy.
It's the same environment we see in the USA, people get shot around towns all the time and we're told that the bast way to stop this is for everyone to buy more guns, and walk around town with a pistol in their pocket.
"offering totally secure functionality"
Of course there's no such thing -- even in the 'cloud' at a premium price. The primary way to breach a cloud based service is (as always) via the client's end points. Cloud providers' security commitment is to their security, not yours. You remain responsible for that, regardless of the hype.
And... as the data is in someone else's cloud they can charge you a £1/byte to get it out. Your data is not yours when it is in their cloud. They own it no matter what the contract or the law says. By the time they catch up with you said data will be in the USA and being milked dry AND Trustmarque will have filed for Bankruptcy as soon as the lat bit of data went overseas.
These Vulture Capitalists/Equity investors only have one goal. Milk the company dry, sell off anything worth more than a few quid and exit stage left leaving a pile of debt behind.
We have all seen it before.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
