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:
