Brett Walmsley, Royal Bolton Hospitals

Brett Walmsley – Chief Technology Officer, Royal Bolton Hospitals. Brett is responsible for the NHS trust’s Security, Infrastructure and Design, delivering high quality care to some 140,000 + patients in Bolton and the surrounding areas. The trust boasts innovation, provisioning a growing number of mobile and IoT devices, wi-fi enabled medical equipment plus data centre and cloud services, whilst ensuring critical patient, financial and clinical research data is protected.

During 2017, Hospitals and GP surgeries in England and Scotland were among at least 16 health service organisations hit by a ransomware attack, using malware called Wanna Decryptor – with reports potentially dozens more were affected. Operations and appointments were cancelled and ambulances diverted at up to 40 hospital trusts. Royal Bolton Hospitals were not affected, no appointments were cancelled or operations cancelled due to the attack. In a pressurised environment where every second counts and could save a life, IT teams need to be able to prioritise threats based on their relevance and severity. Brett Walmsley will be discussing the days of Wannacry and the power of innovation and automation with Cyber Security within an extremely sensitive environment.