The case for data-centric architecture for hybrid cloud
August 30, 2019
By Josh Gluck
The cloud has taken hold in healthcare, and it is growing rapidly. In fact, the global healthcare cloud computing market will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 22 percent — growing by $16.4 billion from 2017 to 2022, according to market research firm Technavio. Two-thirds of IT leaders from health systems, hospitals, and other large healthcare organizations currently use the cloud or cloud services at their facilities, according to a study by HIMSS Analytics.
While it is promoted as a highway to simpler and more cost-effective IT delivery, cloud is rapidly becoming more complex. Across all industries, the average enterprise environment uses five or six separate cloud environments that can be a combination of private, on-premises and public clouds, according to the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC). Compounding this complexity is the vast array of remote hosting agreements for services such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that some organizations include in their cloud strategy.
All of this makes it more difficult and expensive to manage both applications and infrastructure. It also sets up a situation in which history is likely to repeat itself, with silos proliferating in the cloud — just as we saw with (and continue to struggle with) on-premises systems. At the same time, healthcare IT is already mired in the complexity of strict regulatory requirements including the privacy and security of patient data.
To avoid repeating history, and to ensure the flexibility needed to reap the many advantages of cloud, regardless of which models are adopted, healthcare organizations need to start with a new foundation, one that focuses on data and places it at the center of everything — a data-centric architecture.
The cloud reality
Healthcare organizations are firmly in the cloud today and have great potential to expand their use of it. Today, they are largely using it to support dev/test, clinical application and data hosting, data recovery and backup. Some cloud-based solutions may be more user friendly than on-premises solutions, but they may not always provide the enterprise-level (or regulatory-mandated) uptime assurances and security that healthcare providers need. Healthcare organizations must establish contractual agreements with cloud service providers that ensure safeguarding of protected health information and other sensitive data under HIPAA, and compliance with related regulations and organizational requirements. Then, they must hold their IT teams and providers accountable for maintaining this compliance. Ultimate responsibility for compliance always resides with the healthcare entity, the CSCC has warned.
Because of their stringent uptime and security requirements, some healthcare organizations will feel forced to choose between on-premises or cloud — but the better option is a hybrid approach.
A flexible and secure foundation for hybrid cloud: The data-centric architecture
Cloud strategies will continue to evolve and will most certainly continue to encompass hybrid, multi-cloud environments. The goal of a hybrid cloud strategy should be to reduce complexity by putting data and IT assets in the right environment. The challenge comes in optimizing this approach in a way that enables healthcare organizations to advance — versus stymie — their efforts to make the most of their valuable data to improve care, outcomes, and operations.
The storage tier presents a particular challenge. On-premises, dedicated enterprise storage arrays have rich features and resiliency, a model where the application relies upon the storage infrastructure for resiliency. In the cloud, relatively simpler storage services are designed to be shared, and scale almost limitlessly, dictating a very different way to build applications, which often implement a lot of the resiliency into the application itself. It makes sense — each of these storage layers was designed for the applications they support. This is all well and good — until you need the freedom to easily move them. Data becomes a key stumbling block.
The right data strategy is key for hybrid, one that works to unify data from on-premises and cloud applications. First and foremost, it should support compatibility, so that applications can move and data can flow. Compatibility should make migration of applications easy, giving healthcare organizations the freedom to run applications where they want and have the data follow.
To create a sustainable path to the hybrid cloud and enable data interoperability, organizations need to start at the foundation. In this case, that means a data-centric architecture that unifies application deployments while ensuring security, enabling healthcare organizations to run multiple clouds and access valuable data and insight while avoiding the infrastructure problems that arise between on-premises enterprise systems and more user-friendly clouds.
A data-centric architecture strategy, which consolidates islands and silos of data infrastructure (on premises or in the cloud), and ultimately simplifies the data foundation, is defined by five key attributes:
● Real-time It supports the capability to find the right insight at the right time to drive improved clinical and operational outcomes.
● On-Demand and self-driving It prioritizes automation at its core and leverages machine learning to provide high levels of availability and proactive support. A data-centric architecture should be easy to provision and evolve with your needs.
● Exceptionally reliable and secure. This is a must — especially when it comes to critical patient data and protected health information.
● Support for multi-cloud environments. It easily allows storage volumes to be moved to and from the cloud, making application and data migration simple, and enabling hybrid use cases for application development, deployment, and protection. Many organizations have become comfortable with the concept of private cloud either within their data center or through remote hosting agreements. Some are moving workloads to the public cloud. A data-centric architecture delivers the flexibility to take advantage of the public cloud when and how an organization chooses.
● Ready for tomorrow. Users expect the cloud to continuously get better, without downtime, delivering more value every year for the same or lower cost. Healthcare organizations should expect the same for their storage infrastructure. They must architect for constant improvement so that storage services can be seamlessly improved, without ever bringing users offline.
A data-centric architecture will enable healthcare organizations to take advantage of the hybrid cloud — avoiding building a new generation of silos, managing the inherent complexity of their environments, and advancing their ability to make the most of their valuable data — whether in the cloud or on-premises. It also will help organizations protect data and ensure IT resilience and regulatory compliance — not only for systems today, but also for systems implemented to address tomorrow’s business needs.
About the author: Josh Gluck, vice president of global healthcare technology strategy, Pure Storage, has over 20 years of experience as an IT executive and has spent the last 15 years focused on healthcare IT, using his expertise to lead teams in the support of medical education, biomedical research, and patient care. Gluck is an adjunct assistant professor of Health Policy & Management at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
The cloud has taken hold in healthcare, and it is growing rapidly. In fact, the global healthcare cloud computing market will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 22 percent — growing by $16.4 billion from 2017 to 2022, according to market research firm Technavio. Two-thirds of IT leaders from health systems, hospitals, and other large healthcare organizations currently use the cloud or cloud services at their facilities, according to a study by HIMSS Analytics.
While it is promoted as a highway to simpler and more cost-effective IT delivery, cloud is rapidly becoming more complex. Across all industries, the average enterprise environment uses five or six separate cloud environments that can be a combination of private, on-premises and public clouds, according to the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC). Compounding this complexity is the vast array of remote hosting agreements for services such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that some organizations include in their cloud strategy.
All of this makes it more difficult and expensive to manage both applications and infrastructure. It also sets up a situation in which history is likely to repeat itself, with silos proliferating in the cloud — just as we saw with (and continue to struggle with) on-premises systems. At the same time, healthcare IT is already mired in the complexity of strict regulatory requirements including the privacy and security of patient data.
To avoid repeating history, and to ensure the flexibility needed to reap the many advantages of cloud, regardless of which models are adopted, healthcare organizations need to start with a new foundation, one that focuses on data and places it at the center of everything — a data-centric architecture.
The cloud reality
Healthcare organizations are firmly in the cloud today and have great potential to expand their use of it. Today, they are largely using it to support dev/test, clinical application and data hosting, data recovery and backup. Some cloud-based solutions may be more user friendly than on-premises solutions, but they may not always provide the enterprise-level (or regulatory-mandated) uptime assurances and security that healthcare providers need. Healthcare organizations must establish contractual agreements with cloud service providers that ensure safeguarding of protected health information and other sensitive data under HIPAA, and compliance with related regulations and organizational requirements. Then, they must hold their IT teams and providers accountable for maintaining this compliance. Ultimate responsibility for compliance always resides with the healthcare entity, the CSCC has warned.
Because of their stringent uptime and security requirements, some healthcare organizations will feel forced to choose between on-premises or cloud — but the better option is a hybrid approach.
A flexible and secure foundation for hybrid cloud: The data-centric architecture
Cloud strategies will continue to evolve and will most certainly continue to encompass hybrid, multi-cloud environments. The goal of a hybrid cloud strategy should be to reduce complexity by putting data and IT assets in the right environment. The challenge comes in optimizing this approach in a way that enables healthcare organizations to advance — versus stymie — their efforts to make the most of their valuable data to improve care, outcomes, and operations.
The storage tier presents a particular challenge. On-premises, dedicated enterprise storage arrays have rich features and resiliency, a model where the application relies upon the storage infrastructure for resiliency. In the cloud, relatively simpler storage services are designed to be shared, and scale almost limitlessly, dictating a very different way to build applications, which often implement a lot of the resiliency into the application itself. It makes sense — each of these storage layers was designed for the applications they support. This is all well and good — until you need the freedom to easily move them. Data becomes a key stumbling block.
The right data strategy is key for hybrid, one that works to unify data from on-premises and cloud applications. First and foremost, it should support compatibility, so that applications can move and data can flow. Compatibility should make migration of applications easy, giving healthcare organizations the freedom to run applications where they want and have the data follow.
To create a sustainable path to the hybrid cloud and enable data interoperability, organizations need to start at the foundation. In this case, that means a data-centric architecture that unifies application deployments while ensuring security, enabling healthcare organizations to run multiple clouds and access valuable data and insight while avoiding the infrastructure problems that arise between on-premises enterprise systems and more user-friendly clouds.
A data-centric architecture strategy, which consolidates islands and silos of data infrastructure (on premises or in the cloud), and ultimately simplifies the data foundation, is defined by five key attributes:
● Real-time It supports the capability to find the right insight at the right time to drive improved clinical and operational outcomes.
● On-Demand and self-driving It prioritizes automation at its core and leverages machine learning to provide high levels of availability and proactive support. A data-centric architecture should be easy to provision and evolve with your needs.
● Exceptionally reliable and secure. This is a must — especially when it comes to critical patient data and protected health information.
● Support for multi-cloud environments. It easily allows storage volumes to be moved to and from the cloud, making application and data migration simple, and enabling hybrid use cases for application development, deployment, and protection. Many organizations have become comfortable with the concept of private cloud either within their data center or through remote hosting agreements. Some are moving workloads to the public cloud. A data-centric architecture delivers the flexibility to take advantage of the public cloud when and how an organization chooses.
● Ready for tomorrow. Users expect the cloud to continuously get better, without downtime, delivering more value every year for the same or lower cost. Healthcare organizations should expect the same for their storage infrastructure. They must architect for constant improvement so that storage services can be seamlessly improved, without ever bringing users offline.
Josh Gluck
About the author: Josh Gluck, vice president of global healthcare technology strategy, Pure Storage, has over 20 years of experience as an IT executive and has spent the last 15 years focused on healthcare IT, using his expertise to lead teams in the support of medical education, biomedical research, and patient care. Gluck is an adjunct assistant professor of Health Policy & Management at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.