Providing World-class Cybersecurity for Staffordshire & Shropshire Health Informatics Services (SSHIS)
Watch the SSHIS Customer Success Story video
This video shows how SSHIS teamed up with ANS to provide 24/7 cybersecurity, tackling the challenge of protecting vital systems through an innovative consortium model. It also highlights the benefits for partners like Staffordshire County Council, ensuring services stay secure and resilient.
Background
Staffordshire & Shropshire Health Informatics Service (SSHIS) is a shared service provider hosted by Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. It employs over 120 staff to deliver ICT and infrastructure services to multiple NHS and other public sector organisations throughout the UK.
Challenge
The public sector is as much a target for cybercriminals as the private sector, with attackers seeking exploit perceived weaknesses in the cybersecurity resourcing of local government and healthcare providers. But if a hack is successful, more than just money is at stake – vital public services could be brought down and, in the worst-case scenarios, lives could be at risk.
SSHIS recognised the need for 24x7x365 Security Operations Centre (SOC) services to monitor, identify and remediate potential cyberattacks on its partners. But it quickly became apparent that building a dedicated internal SOC with the necessary skills, experience and tooling would be prohibitively costly – especially because the high demand for cybersecurity skills makes it difficult to retain people in those roles on public sector salaries.
To help its public sector partners maintain a strong line of defence against attackers, SSHIS needed partner support.
Solution
To solve this challenge, SSHIS devised on a unique solution: SSHIS would procure a third-party SOC solution and provide it to its partners with a variety of wraparound support and advisory services, including agreeing runbooks for how to respond to certain types of events, putting in place policies and processes to enable partners to communicate effectively with their organisation around cybersecurity, and assistance producing major incident plans outlining what to do in the event of significant attacks
After a comprehensive procurement process, ANS’ proposal was selected as the one that delivered the best value in terms of service quality and cost. With ANS’ strong cybersecurity credentials (being in the top 1% of Microsoft’s global security partners and membership of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association), as well as strong sector expertise across the public sector, we were the clear / historical relationship with SSHIS
Implementation was speedy, and ANS’ dedicated cybersecurity experts configured the tooling, particularly Sentinel – Microsoft’s Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution – to ensure that the information feeding into the system would provide the greatest value.
Outcome
SSHIS, in collaboration with ANS, now provides SOC services to a multitude of public sector partners across healthcare and local government, who now have access to fully round-the-clock team to monitor, identify, triage and remediate cybersecurity threats. ANS’ SOC analysts also perform a crucial advisory role to SSHIS and its partners, feeding up-to-date threat intelligence information as well as constant, proactive recommendations for how to improve security posture. Crucially, this allows vital systems to remain secure and operational so that members of the public can continue to use the services they need.
One of the public sector organisations that utilises the SOC service is Staffordshire County Council, which has seen incredible improvements to its security posture and ability to protect itself against threats.
Watch the Staffordshire County Council Customer Success Story video
Discover how Staffordshire County Council strengthened its cybersecurity posture through a strategic partnership with SSHIS and ANS. In this video, Vic Falcus, Head of ICT, shares how ANS delivered a cost-effective and expertly tailored Security Operations Centre (SOC) service providing round-the-clock protection and proactive threat intelligence. With deep expertise in the public sector and healthcare, ANS proved to be the ideal partner in helping to safeguard vital services and support long-term resilience.
The Future
Due to the innovative nature of the consortium model, SSHIS and its partners have access to a deeper level of cybersecurity protection that they might not have been able to get individually. SSHIS is now actively seeking to add more partners to the service, unlocking greater economies of scale for organisations across the public sector.
“There were very few companies that we had the confidence they understood what we wanted from the relationship, which wasn’t a transactional relationship. We wanted a partner with knowledge transfer and an understanding how our business works. It was important for us to have someone we trusted who could develop the service, which allows us to focus on the business side of cybersecurity with our partners.”
Adam Cooper – Director of IT, Staffordshire & Shropshire County Council