If you are interested in transitioning your organisation to NHS.net, the below factors must be taken into consideration prior to joining to ensure a smooth transition process.
Business Process Considerations
- Project Resource Availability – It is essential that the organisation is suitably resourced for the migration timeline as part of the transition to NHS.net.
- We suggest that you will need the following resources available throughout the transition; Key Sponsor, ExO & O365 Engineer(s), Project Manager and a Change / Comms resource.
- Business Case – A clear, trust-specific Business Case with Board-level approval is essential to ensure a smooth and supported transition to NHS.net. Each organisation is responsible for developing its own Business Case and securing the necessary internal approvals to proceed with onboarding.
- Information Governance – Organisations should begin IG processes as early as possible to support compliance and enable a smooth transition. A central DPIA from NHSE is available, covering the core NHS.net service, and can be shared to support local assessments. However, each organisation remains responsible for its own migration activities and must assess whether additional, locally-specific DPIA considerations are required.
- Licensing – Organisations should plan licence requirements well in advance of migration by reviewing current usage, checking approved top-ups here: Licence Onboarding Page, and identifying likely requirements in the shared tenant. Before making any formal requests, engage early with your LSP and Microsoft to confirm intent to migrate and discuss potential needs such as multi-tenant amendments, extended migration timelines, and/or tenant remaps. Early planning and coordination are essential to ensure a smooth onboarding process. For more information on Licensing, click here.
Technical Considerations
- Technical Gap – Differences between current organisation tenant and nhs.net should be considered and accepted. As part of the transition, we are trying to limit impact to the end user as much as possible.
- On Prem Data – The Transition to NHS.net project will only transfer workloads hosted in Microsoft365. If you have on-prem data, you can still join the Transition programme, but these specific workloads will not be transferred.
- Data Quality – In order to transition effectively the organisation must have accurate and validated data to allow smooth testing activities.
- DPIA – The organisation must complete a Data Protection Impact Assessment, using the provided templates:
- O365 Storage on New Tenant – Covers ongoing data storage on the NHS.net Connect tenant.
- O365 Data Migration – Covers data migration to the central tenant.
- These templates will be provided after the introductory webinar and must be completed to ensure data protection compliance.