University Hospital Birmingham

University Hospital Birmingham (UHB) NHS Foundation Trust is the leading teaching hospital in the West Midlands, treating half a million patients a year.

Ensuring the hospital’s email service is kept reliable and secure is therefore essential, and a recent project to address this area is yet another success story for the IT group.

Stephen Chilton, deputy director of ICT at UHB explains: “While there are no specific regulations governing the retention of email messages in NHS organisations, there were a number of other drivers for our implementation, which had the added benefit of helping us to comply with wider regulations such as the Data Protection Act, Investigatory Powers Act, Telecommunications Regulations and Freedom of Information Act. Our performance statistics show that since implementing the archiving system end-user performance has been enhanced and demand on core storage has been curtailed significantly. What’s more, a far cry from the previously painful and long-winded process of retrieving emails, IT services can now respond to email retrieval requests within minutes, rather than weeks, which frees up our time for more strategic activity.”

After a detailed selection process, UHB selected ZANTAZ Enterprise Archive Solution from Essential to improve storage management, maintain Exchange performance and to address current and future compliance requirements. EAS already contains over 15 million archived emails.