The crucial role of automation in unlocking the potential and advantages of the hybrid cloud in the healthcare sector.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of healthcare IT, the integration of hybrid cloud and hybrid multicloud infrastructures has emerged as a game-changer. Andrew Fanning, an enterprise architect at CDW, emphasizes the significance of automation in these environments, particularly for healthcare organizations.
A hybrid cloud environment combines public cloud services, private cloud resources, and on-premises systems into a cohesive framework. This setup offers seamless data and application portability across multiple platforms, allowing healthcare providers to leverage the scalability and flexibility of public clouds while maintaining the control and security of private clouds or local data centers.
Hybrid multicloud extends this concept by involving multiple public cloud providers, private clouds, and on-premises infrastructure. This approach enables organizations to leverage the specific strengths and compliance features of different cloud vendors simultaneously.
The benefits of hybrid cloud and hybrid multicloud infrastructures are manifold. They provide enhanced agility and developer productivity, enabling healthcare providers to rapidly adapt IT services to evolving patient care needs and regulatory changes. They also improve control and compliance, allowing sensitive patient data to remain on-premises or in private clouds, ensuring compliance with strict data privacy regulations.
Moreover, these infrastructures optimize resource use and cost efficiency by strategically distributing workloads based on capacity and sensitivity. They offer scalability and resilience, handling sudden spikes in demand without impacting core private cloud workloads. They also provide access to innovation and flexibility, allowing healthcare organizations to adopt cutting-edge technologies from different cloud providers.
Security and risk mitigation are other key advantages. By distributing workloads across public, private, and on-premises clouds, hybrid multicloud environments lower risk exposure and minimize single points of failure.
Automation plays a crucial role in this context. It can help hide the difference between deploying on-premises and in the cloud, providing a more seamless user experience. CDW's Unified Cloud concept, for instance, unifies the on-prem data center with a public cloud provider, offering increased flexibility and a technical service delivery model based on business and financial drivers.
Two automation tools currently dominating the market are Ansible and TerraForm, offering mutual flexibility. Fanning advises healthcare IT teams to understand their cloud journey and IT environment before deploying full-scale, cloud-based automation.
CDW describes hybrid cloud as a foundational philosophy, requiring consistent patterns and practices across different platforms. The next steps involve optimizing an organization's hybrid cloud environment to achieve technical and business objectives more cost-effectively and efficiently than public cloud or private cloud alone.
73% of healthcare organizations surveyed by Forrester use multiple public cloud vendors, and Liz Centoni, Cisco's chief strategy officer, highlights hybrid cloud and multicloud as the primary approach for today's enterprises, including healthcare organizations.
In summary, hybrid cloud and hybrid multicloud infrastructures provide healthcare organizations with the agility, control, compliance, scalability, and innovation needed to efficiently manage sensitive data, accelerate development, and respond dynamically to patient care demands while maintaining robust security and regulatory adherence. This makes them especially well-suited for the complex, high-stakes environment of healthcare IT.
Technology, such as automation tools like Ansible and TerraForm, plays a crucial role in the integration of data-and-cloud-computing infrastructures like hybrid cloud and hybrid multicloud. These technological advancements help healthcare organizations optimize their resource use, improve agility, and provide a more seamless user experience.
