By Sagi Brody, Chief Technology Officer, Webair
Twitter: @webairsagi
Twitter: @WebairInc
Healthcare IT organizations are constantly faced with one challenge after another when attempting to establish an effective and reliable solution for the deployment, maintenance and operation of critical infrastructure systems. Managing a wide range of interoperable on-premises, off-premises and third-party services has grown increasingly complex, making it more difficult than ever to implement an advanced IT strategy on an affordable budget.
This is no easy task, leaving healthcare IT organizations with one of two options. The first option is to spend a considerable amount of financial resources sourcing expensive IT staff with a high level of expertise in multiple areas of system management and security. Alternatively, the organization can outsource some or all of their infrastructure and systems to third-party vendors with proven success ensuring the accessibility and reliability of data and applications.
Public vs. Private Cloud
Leveraging public cloud infrastructure is trending as organizations begin to recognize the cloud’s ability to circumnavigate many capital and operational expenses associated with the use of enterprise applications. That said, for many healthcare IT organizations, the loss of control over data that is experienced when utilizing the public cloud is unsettling. Latency as well as data sovereignty become major concerns, forcing companies to opt for on-premise deployments. In addition, many public cloud offerings are not managed, and the responsibility for maintenance, compliance and operational efficiency falls on the organization itself.
Going Hybrid
Combating these issues, hybrid cloud solutions provide companies with the best of both worlds, combining on-premises and off-premises infrastructure. These strategies, when deployed with an effective third-party managed services provider, can also ensure regulatory compliance and security of all applications and data. This type of solution provides the healthcare IT organization with cloud services that function as if they are on-premises, while maintaining the simplicity of the public cloud with services that are backed and managed by a single provider with BAAs and SLAs.
This solution allows users to consume cloud services without exposing sensitive data to the public internet, providing the scalability and flexibility of the cloud with the security and performance of a dedicated environment.
One Step at a Time
Unfortunately, in most situations, switching existing systems over to third-party cloud services and solutions is challenging and comes with a steep barrier to entry. Most organizations are unable to replace all components of their environment at once in order to meet the requirements of a more advanced system. To combat this, it’s important to identify a provider that will help implement an incremental plan to update infrastructure over the course of a multiphase project.
In addition, with the increasing mobility of the healthcare workforce, data must be accessible from anywhere at any time in a way that is not only fast and simple, but highly secure as it is shared across multiple systems. By building a hybrid solution into their IT systems with the help of a managed services provider, healthcare organizations are taking control of the way they consume cloud technology, leveraging a local data center as their connectivity hub. The ideal is to connect to one and consume many. Utilizing this approach, healthcare IT organizations can build a bridge to regional cloud providers that provides them with the ability to consume local and compliant private cloud resources as well as global public clouds. Instead of locking them into a single cloud vendor that lacks the necessary flexibility and scalability to grow with their business, this option provides a flexible solution that allows them to select the best platform for each individual application and workload.