What’s Driving Healthcare’s Accelerated Cloud Migration

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Beyond Cost Control

For many companies, cost control is the initial motivator for moving to the cloud. “We generally see cost as the primary - but preliminary - driver when financial inflection points hit, like co-location lease expirations, server equipment reaching end of life, or the need to make large capital upgrade purchases for servers, storage, or backup,” said Gerry Miller, CEO of Healthcare MSP Cloudticity. However, flexibility, agility and scalability enter the scene soon after as the cloud’s robust capabilities become more apparent to business leaders.

Once they begin cloud migration, many businesses quickly realize that the cloud can do more than cut costs. Jeff Townes, Managing Partner of IT consultancy Pariveda, points out that the cloud provides both foundational and innovative benefits, the needs for which have been fast-tracked due to the global pandemic, especially when it comes to the healthcare industry.

The pandemic has highlighted just how essential rapid provisioning and onboarding are to healthcare responsiveness. It has also served to underscore the importance of collaboration among systems and providers alike. The cloud empowers these necessities in a way on-premise infrastructures cannot.

Foundational and Innovative Drivers

For the healthcare industry specifically, foundational drivers include the expanding needs around data collection and data sharing, as well as electronic health record (EHR) scaling and cross-provider integration and the need for cloud-based integrated data platforms. Evolving compliance requirements can also play a role.

Innovative drivers are equally compelling, including easier integration with AI-based devices used in diagnostic decision making and enabling remote monitoring and telehealth capabilities, both of which require flexible support that can scale up or down with demand.

All of these drivers contribute to healthcare providers’ ability to gather, share, and analyze data; collaborate on diagnosis and treatment; and administer the appropriate care.

Lessons Learned

There are some products of the frightening pandemic response exercise that could stand to benefit the healthcare industry going forward. Miller has observed an increased level of cooperation between state agencies and other healthcare entities, who have learned to dispense with some bureaucracy and red tape. “We’ve seen things that used to take 18 months now just take a matter of days,“ Miller said.

Additionally, many healthcare customers have had to fast track their self education when it comes to the cloud and security. According to Townes, conversations with clients and prospects have gotten more sophisticated and clients better understand that security is an essential and not a barrier, even when time is of the essence.

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