Most healthcare providers make use of a variety of infrastructure services as they seek to meet their continuously evolving IT requirements. This usually starts with the storage of data typically in an in house data centre. From there they may be a need for a managed service followed by a jump to the cloud and an Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) platform, and ultimately a hybrid cloud solution.
The staged manner of such an evolution suggests a complete transformation over time, however healthcare companies may end up finding that the best long term approach consists of making use of a variety of options. This is particularly true for legacy systems which find it difficult to capitalize on flexible architecture and virtualization.
Not every
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The hybrid approach enables companies to make use of their existing infrastructure and maintain control of sensitive data in house, whilst also utilizing the cloud to achieve scale and cost savings.
A hybrid cloud infrastructure can also meet certain specific challenges that faces the health care sector in general. This includes sensitivity to capital expenditures, exceeding current facility capacity, increasing data demands and increasing application criticality. One important area that affects healthcare is the rising number of acquisitions necessary to fill the gaps in business needs, which provides further complication of the application integration requirements.
All of this means it is critical for healthcare companies to find the right vendor along this path. The requirements for a vendor include security, resiliency, power, network carrier options and geographic capabilities. Additionally healthcare companies need to stay on the right side of HIPAA Omnibus regulation. The vendor should also be willing to enter into a Business Associate Agreement for the storage of electronic patient