RDS outages -update from Tactuum

Mark Buchner, CEO of Tactuum, has provided the following explanation and assurance regarding recent outages:

‘As delivery partner of the Right Decision Service (RDS) Tactuum would like to provide some assurance to users that we have been working extremely hard to eliminate the interruptions to service and wanted to provide a short summary of the underlying causes. 

There are two principal drivers that have had impact upon RDS resilience, both of which relate to scale:

• As use and adoption of RDS has grown, so too have the demands on the hosting infrastructure and platform configuration. 
• Additionally, the most recent impacts have been the result of significantly growing numbers of AI-bots looking to harvest/crawl the information and resources within RDS. 

Both drivers have required different responses as we adjust the RDS platform to support increased use, and increased AI-bot harvesting/crawling.  Additional related work has also be done to ensure security is robust and that should an issue occur, automated resilience is in place.  We expect to see a significantly improved service as a result of these changes. ‘

 If further information on the detail of this work is required then please contact ann.wales3@nhs.scot in the first instance who manages and oversees the engagement with Tactuum.