January 1, 2018 by Siobhan Climer
The cloud has changed the way organizations store and process data by offering use-based pricing models and increased agility. However, while many industries have successfully adopted the cloud, healthcare has lagged due to concerns around security, healthcare-specific application integrations, and bandwidth needs. While a complete cloud migration may not be immediately viable, a hybrid cloud for healthcare could be the transformative step needed to take your organization forward.
Cloud Benefits For Healthcare
One of the big reasons the hybrid cloud for healthcare is an important option is due to improved agility. Healthcare institutions are under many unique pressures today. Rising costs, regulatory complexities, and expectations – both internally and externally – about care quality require health organizations to embed tech efficiently. Using the cloud addresses these concerns. Subscription pay-as-you-use models decrease enormous capital expenditures on data center infrastructure. Cloud providers hire regulatory experts to address HIPAA, HRRP, CHIP, the ACA, and other laws and regulations within the cloud architecture and user experience. Technology tools – APIs, SaaS, and cloud solutions – enable healthcare organizations to better prevent, predict, and respond to patient needs.
Obstacles To Cloud Migrations
With so much potential for the hybrid cloud for healthcare, why is it that healthcare organizations lag in cloud adoption?
For one, change is hard. Healthcare institutions are big and creating large-scale change in a big organization is difficult.
What’s more? Despite the regulatory affinity offered by the cloud, security is often seen as weaker and less in an organization’s control when responsibility is shared with a cloud provider. That puts IT teams off due to the risk of PHI exposure. Ensuring a successful cloud migration within a healthcare organization – whether it’s a small urgent care clinic or a large multi-campus hospital – is, therefore, full of obstacles.
Why A Hybrid Cloud For Healthcare?
The hybrid cloud can address these concerns. Unlike an all-in cloud migration, a hybrid cloud solution allows your healthcare organization to dip its toes into the cloud model. Moving a single application or some aspect of the business to the cloud ensures a controlled migration. This can help to convince skeptics within the organization and give the teams time to develop – and improve – training, communication, and strategy.
Finally, despite the gut feelings of some healthcare leaders, security in the cloud is almost always better than the security of an on-premise data center. The big cloud providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure – offer security that meets the needs of organizations across industries, with support for all the regulatory needs of healthcare providers. Securing a data center on site requires a great deal of investment, and the risk of a data breach or data leak increases every day. The hybrid cloud for healthcare addresses these fears, leading to cost reductions and care improvements across the board.
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About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
Contact us at GoMindsight.com.
About The Author
Siobhan Climer, Science and Technology Writer for Mindsight, writes about technology trends in education, healthcare, and business. She previously taught STEM programs in elementary classrooms and museums, and writes extensively about cybersecurity, disaster recovery, cloud services, backups, data storage, network infrastructure, and the contact center. When she’s not writing tech, she’s writing fantasy, gardening, and exploring the world with her twin two-year old daughters. Find her on twitter @techtalksio.
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