NHS gets £40M to cut login times on its IT systems

Such as?

The idea that anything is free is ludicrous. You are either spending time (wages) or money (buying solutions).

Why would £40 million be a lot of money for the IT systems of the entire public healthcare system in the UK? The NHS has a yearly budget of £114 billion, so this particular IT spend is only 0.03% the size of their yearly budget.

There's nothing decadent about this. It's essentially deferred maintenance that is long overdue, probably overdue because the government had to wade through people like you who can't help but complain every time a government organization wants to invest in modernizing.

I'd also like to see you walk into a situation like this, no matter how much power you had, and see how far 'Arguments about "but corporate / compliance / vendor contracts / red tape" be damned.' gets you.

Contracts might include processes that must be followed for any modification so nobody gets sued afterwards.

The developers who implemented the software might not even be with the contractor anymore. So you pay for training someone else, too.

That would be Simon Eccles at NHSX. https://twitter.com/NHSCCIO

NHSX is reasonably new. https://www.nhsx.nhs.uk/

They've been having some trouble recruiting and retaining staff. https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/europe/nhsx-reviews-st...

I do feel that you haven't understood the complexity of the landscape. Not of the vendors, because in theory we could just impose standards of interoperability upon them with RFC like documents. But the complexity of NHS providers. There are thousands of GPs, hundreds of NHS trusts, and they've all got to talk to each other while providing strong access controls and audits.

EDIT: I don't normally ask about downvotes, but I'm curious about the votes in this post, and I'd be grateful for any explanation about downvoting.

Plugging into wired ethernet is only free if you have a wired port near the computer and it connects (properly) to an available port on a network switch and you have patch cables onsite and free labor to connect them (including labor that can access the network closet if needed) and free labor to configure the computer to prefer the wired over the wireless, if necessary.

Ideally, it's not a lot of labor, and there's likely to be some switch ports available and some patch cables available, but there's also probably a reason the computers are using wifi if they are.

You can argue this is probably part of someone's job already, but if they aren't doing it because they have too much other stuff to do, you'll need to pay someone else to do it.

...probably still running Windows 7.

Better if you can replace it with a CIFS mount

Fetch size is a standard JDBC parameter for tweaking the number of rows paged in a database query. The Sun/Oracle default was 10 rows and the app needed to retrieve thousands. So it would retrieve 10, process them, retrieve 10 more, etc. Which was minimal overhead on most networks, but on a network with high latency it meant there was perhaps a couple of seconds delay with each fetch.

What do you mean? That some other NHS systems have their own directory of users, or there is a master user/pass shared by everyone?

Sure you’d still not have SSO, but you could just let everything running, logged in, in your session on the server.

You don't mention your use case but it's almost always a bad idea to be logging in as someone else, not just at Google but everywhere. Some sort of access delegation would probably be much better.

As for a work account, I keep it in a separate Chrome profile. Not because of logging in but because you can sync everything without risking spillage.

There's a ton of threat mitigation and detection of unusual activities going on behind the scenes. This is a big reason why my company uses GSuite SSO - it's basically impossible to achieve a similar level of security with a DIY SSO setup. Auth is very hard to get right with all corner cases considered.

JS trickery is key to detecting bots, and blocking super-outdated browsers like Konqueror that basically lack all modern security mitigations is a reasonable thing to do (and probably allows them to remove less strict fallbacks for those browsers that were previously abused by bad actors).

For example, to log into my college gmail account, I type my email, get redirected to the schools sso page (retype my username and password), then get redirected to gmail.

Plus if you have a bunch of tabs open (G Suite), it will log you in all of them once you log in on one.

US DOD has well over 4 million Active Duty, Civilian Employees, Contractors, etc. Though numbers are hard to pin down, since the number of contractors is in many cases not what is being paid for by the contract (e.g. firm-fixed price, and service based contracts like IDIQ which the contract holder dedicates cleared staff, but otherwise it's hard to know; compared to time-and-material/"butts-in-seats" where numbers are know by the Government per contract).

The US DOD attempted to move everything to MS AD at one point but hit a limitation in the number of objects AD let's you create (~2bn).