Cloud Services: Reaches New High in Healthcare

Healthcare clients are now facing substantial increases in data, forcing a reevaluation of cloud solutions

Several industry verticals have slowly adopted cloud services including legal, financial services and healthcare. Healthcare clients have traditionally been slow adopters of perceived cutting-edge technologies, and cloud computing has been no exception. However, healthcare clients are now facing substantial increases in data, forcing a reevaluation of cloud solutions.

Data management for Netrix healthcare clients is growing from 30 – 40 percent, year over year. Traditional on-premise datacenters require heavy investments to keep pace with the data growth. Moreover, this level of data growth often requires expensive data warehousing solution investment.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid clouds provide a cost beneficial and scalable solution, that provides storage and compute power, to manage the accelerating growth of data. Hybrid solutions allow organizations to utilize their own datacenter, partner data centers and public cloud providers for an integrated experience and management platform.
Hybrid cloud solutions provide mechanisms to mitigate risk associated with data privacy and compliance. HIPAA and the HITECH Act provide standards and regulation for managing private healthcare information (PHI).

HIPAA regulations require that covered entities and their business associates—in this case, a cloud provider when it provides cloud services to covered organizations — enter into contracts to ensure that those cloud providers will adequately protect PHI. However, these contracts help support your HIPAA compliance but does not achieve it on its’ own. Your organization is still responsible for ensuring that you have the required processes and compliance programs in place.

Cloud Computing in Healthcare

Starting in late 2016, healthcare organizations began to take a more structured and real approach to evaluating cloud solutions, to manage the data growth they are experiencing. Evaluation and migration to online productivity tools, like moving large mailboxes and archives to solutions like Office 365 have provided on premises storage relief as a first step.

Moving the management of backups to the cloud has been a popular second step. Consultation for larger data considerations that require additional compliance are being evaluated and processes to support that transition over time are becoming available. Fortunately for our clients, Netrix is fully prepared to undertake the assessments and provide guidance on mapping business goals to the cloud strategically.

Cloud Migration

Our clients have leveraged our Cloud Accelerate offering that provides a structured but agile migration to various cloud technologies with this reevaluation. We focus on specific business problems, while mapping that back to a hybrid cloud solution, then rinse and repeat.

Cloud Accelerate is not just a point in time roadmap and assessment, but instead consistently and regularly engages our cloud architects monthly while you transition in your cloud adoption journey. Our clients have seen a greater increase in adoption, less confusion on which cloud they should be adopting and understand the costs of cloud adoption fully, with limited cost surprises.

As standardization of healthcare data continues and perceived security of the cloud improves, Cloud will catch up in playing a large role in the management and operations of the healthcare industry, similar to its current role in less regulated business. Have cloud needs in healthcare? Talk to one of our non-sales engineers today to learn more.

Written by: Don Penland, Director of Online Productivity