Mersey Care NHS Trust has signed a £3m deal for cloud services, in a move intended to deliver around £1.5m in savings.
Under the five-year contract, Mersey Care NHS Trusts' operational data and ICT infrastructure will move to SCC's OptimiseCloud platform. The deal includes patient administration services, email provision, Share Point and a business intelligence (BI) system.
Some 15TB of data stored on the Trust's 90 in-house servers will be transferred to the company's datacentre from December.
Neil Smith, director of finance at Mersey Care Trust, said: "After an extensive review, the business case for moving to a cloud-based platform was compelling, offering significant savings over the alternative options we considered.
"The move will provide a more flexible infrastructure capable of responding to the organisation's changing IT needs, freeing up the technical services IT resource to work on application developments and other service delivery projects," Neil Smith added.
The deal follows a framework agreement signed earlier this summer with Informatics Merseyside to allow nine organisations in the North West to access the cloud services.
A minimum of 15% is expected to be taken out of running costs, as bodies avoid maintenance and upgrade to their on-site data centres and servers.
The estimated cost of IT services for all the trusts over the next five years is about £16m if they all use the framework, compared to £20m if they built their own IT.
Dympna Wilson, head of service delivery for Informatics Merseyside, said the move would free up its 25 technical staff from having to spend as much time on systems administration work.
"We are doing a lot of innovative work in the mobile arena, and this means our staff can work with clinicians more closely on things like apps," Dympna Wilson said.
She said the procurement process began in 2009, ahead of the government's G-Cloud. But she added the body would look at the G-Cloud, once the framework contract expires.
SCC recently invested £25million in cloud services the company also offers cloud services to IL2 and IL3 services on the CloudStore.
