As more healthcare enterprises grow and merge, they reach a certain scale where cloud computing becomes essential. Colocation will continue to play a big part in those changes to meet the future needs of the healthcare enterprise.
According to a 2017 HIMSS Analytics survey of healthcare IT executives, 65% say their organisations are using cloud or cloud services. With the growing use of hybrid and multicloud environments in healthcare, data centres worldwide must have the connectivity, flexibility, and broad services to meet these changing needs.
Hybrid and multicloud have many similarities but some important differences. Multicloud uses multiple different public and private cloud services, often from multiple different providers for ideal workload placement. Hybrid combines public and private clouds designed to work together. Both enable healthcare enterprises to place applications and workloads where they are best suited for security and services delivery.
Some Major Benefits of Colocation as part of your ICT Infrastructure
The ability to put applications in different clouds for security and scalability among other needs is a hallmark of colocation for hybrid and multicloud strategies. While an individual application lives on a single cloud, the organisation is multicloud-based, which enables them to change its cloud source as its security needs change. This is common where things like security information is added to an application database query. But organisations also need to consider how many other systems each application is going to touch, such as backup or monitoring.
As healthcare enterprises merge to lower costs and increase economies of scale, the ability to share data for patient care and analytics becomes more important, which fuels more multicloud adoption. The future of the cloud and colocation where healthcare research, mergers, and innovation are regional hallmarks, cloud strategies must consider new technologies such as AI, blockchain, robotics, IoT and big data.
While healthcare will continue to leverage private cloud solutions due to security and regulatory compliance needs, public cloud will play an increasing role in their cloud strategies. That can be seen in the fact that these enterprises are deploying countless SaaS-delivered solutions for EHR, clinical decision, and virtual care support among others.
Technology that enables seamless data sharing across disparate EHRs and connected health systems is coming into greater focus with each passing day. While some are newer technologies, others are just passing the adoption tipping point for healthcare enterprises. An example of the former is blockchain technology, which is poised to provide greater PHI record security in a multicloud and healthcare enterprise connected world.
The Future of Cloud and Colocation in Healthcare
While use of PaaS and IaaS are still fairly low in enterprise healthcare settings, this will become more common as they seek ways to have more control over regulatory compliance. Additionally, application development will be more crucial in these environments where IaaS and PaaS can deliver increased process streamlining, control and scalability. Data centres will also have to respond to the uptick in mergers and acquisitions in healthcare. That will mean delivering interconnection options from cloud providers that can make interoperability of EHR and other complex systems a reality.
In a recent HITInfrastructure.com article, the HIT news publication reported on how major cloud providers are proposing open standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to help healthcare with interoperability. As more healthcare enterprises merge, this would mean that EHR data from multiple systems and across healthcare enterprises could engage in real-time data sharing, aggregation and analysis for patient care with greater version control.
When it comes to choosing a data centre, global colocation providers must meet the needs of a dynamic healthcare environment by responding and adapting to countless changes. Developing a partnership with the few that can meet this bar will provide healthcare enterprises with the flexibility, security, and innovation they need to continually improve patient outcomes. To find out how Telehouse can support healthcare ICT solutions in the data centre and in the cloud contact us or check out our case studies.