The Cloud Can Improve Availability
Cloud vendors have an economy of scale, so they can provide availability more efficiently and cost-effectively. “Availability can definitely improve with the cloud,” Turk says.
Even so, healthcare organizations should identify the workloads they absolutely cannot afford to lose access to.
“If you really cannot dare to lose your most critical applications, even for minutes, then you might think twice about whether they qualify for the cloud,” he says.
How Do Hybrid Environments Impact Interoperability?
A healthcare organization can have hundreds of applications. If some of those move to the cloud and others remain on-premises, the organization must understand how that hybrid environment can impact interoperability as well as latency.
With on-premises devices, consider their entire data journey to decide if any of the software on that journey can or should belong in the cloud. For example, in a healthcare lab, a specimen is placed in various analyzers to run tests, which generate results that middleware translates and then sends to the patient’s electronic health records (EHR). In that journey, Turk says, “only the EHR should belong in the cloud, because everything else has to be close to the instruments and localized in the lab.”
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Managing Healthcare Workloads in the Cloud Through Partnerships
According to the CDW survey, half of all respondents across industries say they manage their cloud environments very effectively. But that’s true of only 43% of healthcare IT leaders.
Healthcare lags behind other industries in part due to a lack of staffing, which can impact an organization’s ability to manage the cloud effectively. That’s why many healthcare organizations are turning to managed services, which help use the cloud more effectively at scale than an organization could on its own. Of the respondents that effectively manage their cloud environments, more than two-thirds (68%) cite cloud management platforms as a key factor.
Organizations might choose Software as a Service solutions or opt for vendors that host large systems, such as EHRs, in the cloud. One advantage of managed services, Turk says, is that “the vendor takes the responsibility for your entire suite of products.”