Sascha Giese, of IT group Solar Winds, on the challenges and opportunities of hybrid cloud tech in healthcare.
The contribution of the healthcare sector to the global community over the past several months cannot be stated enough, as professionals the world over continue to battle the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic each day.
Now is the time to carefully consider the efficiency and productivity of this industry in the context of the technology used to support it during what has been—and continues to be—an extremely challenging time.
While healthcare may be on the cusp of progressive technology such as robotics and telemedicine, hybrid cloud is proving to be higher on the priority list. According to the recent SolarWinds IT Trends Report, public sector IT professionals are focusing less on emerging technologies (18%), and more on security (55%), cloud computing (53%), and hybrid IT (37%).
But as hybrid IT becomes more prominent in this sector, can IT pros manage the onset of complexity while keeping their networks as spotless and efficient as a doctor’s surgery?
They can, but it takes effort. Decisive action, proper tools, and the right mindset can help IT pros meet the rapidly accelerating needs of healthcare while juggling the many standards and regulations of the industry.
A hard pill to swallow
Of the two, compliance is a bigger challenge than cloud complexity. Indeed, pressure to comply with industry standards surrounding service quality and data security is driving healthcare’s current digital transformation.
But when digital operations inevitably scale, IT pros will face the unenviable task of ensuring compliance as they manage multiple clouds, larger data volumes, and more networked devices than they can possibly track. And when you’re dealing with lives, it only takes a failure or two to tip things over the edge.
So what can healthcare IT pros do? One option is to grit their teeth and “build” compliance into every aspect of their networks, which reduces the speed of scalability and incurs higher costs.
Alternatively, they could “buy” this level of compliance. There’s no shortage of industry-certified vendors or providers who offer solutions—like data security and monitoring—to meet the industry’s stringent standards.
In fact, taking this route may be an increasingly viable way for IT pros to transfer the burden of compliance to knowledgeable and better-prepared partners, even as they focus on delivering cloud stability and performance to medical staff whenever and wherever they need it.
Prevention before cure
Of course, you can’t talk about compliance without raising the issue of network and data security in the cloud. The generally high frequency of data breaches in healthcare suggests a need to rethink cybersecurity, particularly as cloud adoption increases.
When it comes to network security, issues pertaining to cost, time, and complexity shouldn’t dominate boardroom decisions. As healthcare operations become increasingly digitised and reach the brink of their capacity fighting the ongoing global pandemic, they’ll face threats and dangers unfamiliar to even the most seasoned healthcare executives.
Thorough network monitoring remains the only sensible and effective method of ensuring sufficient levels of security.
This is especially true as healthcare workers gain the ability to work more remotely; the rate of technical change in the industry is continuing at breakneck speed, introducing everything from new and more complex IoT solutions to technologies relying on AI and machine learning.
Compliant-ready tools for network monitoring will allow IT pros to obtain greater network visibility.
IT pros should manage their hybrid infrastructures on the assumption they could eventually fail. This means redundancy and preventive measures (like backup and disaster recovery) come second only to cybersecurity in terms of importance. This is especially true in healthcare, where equipment failures cost more than time and money.
It’s crucial for IT pros to consolidate the configuration data of all mission-critical systems and services connecting to and from their cloud-based infrastructures.
This repository allows for a quick restoration of the virtual network to its optimum state within minutes of an outage. This is one of the simplest and yet most overlooked methods for backing up systems, and it isn’t difficult to perform with the solutions offered by cloud providers.
In practice, it should allow IT pros to ensure a level of operational compliance, even while they troubleshoot a data breach or kick-start a full system restore.
Though the healthcare industry is still in the early phase when it comes to the adoption of hybrid infrastructure, when we think about our present healthcare challenges and stretched resources, this trend is set to accelerate.
IT pros need to be prepared for the accompanying complexity in the network and compliance to ensure they can continue to deliver the services on which the country relies.
