College of Medicine and Dentistry takes finance to the cloud

The College of Medicine and Dentistry was founded in 2018, when it split from the BPP University School of Health. With just two internal IT staff remaining after the split, the college needed to build its own IT capabilities to support existing applications, as well as 200 students and a multinational faculty. The answer was the cloud, specifically infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from IONOS Cloud, which offered the reliability and security required, alongside a high standard of customer service.

For the college’s implementation partner, Serviceteam IT, the IONOS Data Center Designer made it possible to launch the finance application in the cloud within 24 hours. Working with IONOS Cloud has been more cost-effective than hosting in-house, and the college is now preparing to migrate more applications to the cloud.

Headquartered in Birmingham, the College of Medicine and Dentistry educates and trains the next generation of dentists and healthcare professionals. This private college was previously part of the BPP University School of Health, which was founded in 2013. In 2018, the College of Medicine and Dentistry was established as an independent organisation.

Today, the college has over 200 students. They study for diplomas and postgraduate qualifications using the college’s clinical facilities and cutting-edge simulation centre. The college offers courses based on the latest research, including digital dentistry.

The split from the BPP University School of Health required the College of Medicine and Dentistry to acquire its own IT capabilities. The college did have servers, but didn’t want to support on-site IT in the long run. The vision was to adopt the cloud for any business functions ancillary to the college’s educational mission.

“With just two internal staff dedicated to IT, we needed a supportive implementation partner,” said Lee Nabbs, Head of IT, College of Medicine and Dentistry. “It was also vital that we choose a cloud provider that would be readily accessible to us when we needed support, and offered a high standard of customer service.”

The college’s finance system contains highly-sensitive information, to which access must be tightly managed, making security a priority. The IONOS Cloud IaaS solution enabled these applications to be locked down so they can only be accessed from IP addresses coming from within the college’s site. Authorised users were expected to be on the Birmingham campus or, if offsite, connected through a virtual private network (VPN).

“IONOS Cloud also helped us with data sovereignty, guaranteeing the college’s data will be stored in the UK, which will be important for patient data later on in their cloud journey,” said Jesson-Ward. “With hyperscale providers, you often have no idea where your data is being stored and processed.”