The contract for a massive NHS email system is up for grabs under a £350m government IT pitch. The Crown Commercial Service has published a tender calling on providers of cloud-based email services to submit their bids for a two-year contract to run the next version of NHSMail. NHSMail is the national email and director …

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Thursday 27th February 2014 17:19 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward

Gmail

Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier and more secure to just sign up all the users with a gmail account?

You could use Yahoo then GCHQ would archive all your x-ray images for you aswell

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1. Thursday 27th February 2014 17:38 GMT Captain Scarlet
  
  Re: Gmail
  
  Oh dear you have just opened a can of worms.
  
  Duck and Cover!
  
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  1. Thursday 27th February 2014 18:55 GMT Peter2
    
    Re: Gmail
    
    Yep, then the NSA wouldn't even need to compromise the NHS network to get intimately private medical material about people, they could just demand it all from the service provider.
    
    Great idea.
    
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    1. Thursday 27th February 2014 20:32 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
      
      Re: Gmail
      
      Well it saves GCHQ having to copy it to a USB stick for them and then leave it on a train
      
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Thursday 27th February 2014 20:03 GMT John Smith 19

Any of those "clouds" in the UK?

Or will US companies play the "safe harbor" provision?

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1. Monday 3rd March 2014 13:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Any of those "clouds" in the UK?
  
  As an IT Security Officer in the NHS all I can say is.. they'll have put that in the contract surely.
  
  Then head back to my corner and cry.
  
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Thursday 27th February 2014 22:30 GMT talk_is_cheap

The wonders of tenders

The contract is to run for 2 years, can you imagine all the setup costs that have to be included in a 2 year contract to support 1/2m accounts and that's not including the capital cost of systems if the system can't just be deployed to current cloud services.

The only real winner is going to be Microsoft yet again via all the licence fees they will be charging.

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1. Friday 28th February 2014 04:56 GMT An0n C0w4rd
  
  Re: The wonders of tenders
  
  Actually, I don't understand the "20 suppliers" part. They want to split the mail service up over 20 different providers? With different mail systems? Calendar interoperability and directory services would become a nightmare. Or are they splitting the platform into different bits? Mail, directory, etc, going to different vendors? If so, who gets to host it all?
  
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  1. Friday 28th February 2014 14:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: The wonders of tenders
    
    It's not NHSmail that's being tendered. It's the framework agreement. After that NHSmail gets tendered through the framework.
    
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Thursday 27th February 2014 23:39 GMT ElNumbre

A vision

I see Office 365 in their future....

I'm not even related to Septic Peg either.

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Friday 28th February 2014 10:30 GMT Anonymous Coward

So does it just prove

Crown Commercial Service doesn't understand "The Cloud" ?

I dread to think about the unencrypted personal medical data being emailed in a public cloud somewhere in cyberspace.

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1. Friday 28th February 2014 14:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: So does it just prove
  
  Not true, I'm afraid. The tender is for a framework for secure email.
  
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Friday 28th February 2014 21:56 GMT Adrian Midgley 1

The previous version was better and still runs

I think.

It was built on Exim...

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Monday 10th March 2014 23:09 GMT Anonymous Coward

Not Quite Right

As I understand it the framework is for the entirety of the public sector, not just NHSmail. The data will be housed in the UK in accordance with Government policies. There's a better description on the EHI site:

http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/EHI/9254/%C2%A3350m-managed-email-framework-released

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