At this point, one thing is clear: The longer you wait to migrate off physical servers, the longer you miss out on the benefits of cloud computing in healthcare.
While the disadvantages of cloud computing in healthcare may loom large — they’re nothing compared to the advantages. Today, cloud security is sophisticated enough to rival private infrastructure, removing the last argument against a cloud migration.
As security has improved, so has connectivity, uptime
Round-the-clock business hours and impenetrable security are now the bare minimum requirements for running a successful business, and cloud has had to keep up.
There’s an understandable tendency to think only healthcare companies can understand healthcare’s needs, but that keeps you from taking advantage of the cloud advances businesses have made.
As you start your cloud migration, you should be thinking about breaking out of the healthcare silo. Here’s how to do it — and the best practices you can borrow.
The positive impact of cloud storage in healthcare
The primary focus of a healthcare organization should be one thing: healthcare. If your IT team is focused on running infrastructure, that’s
The thought of managing a migration might be enough to scare you away from the benefits, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We have teams who do nothing but migrate critical applications and data for our clients. They’ll walk you through the proper planning, and show you ways to automate and optimize your systems.
See our step-by-step guide for managing a cloud migration
How to get the advantages of cloud computing without staying siloed in healthcare
Many of the healthcare institutions we work with initially want to keep their data and infrastructure with companies that exclusively work in the healthcare industry. The focus makes them feel comfortable, and they assume a HIPAA-certified service provider will be the best choice for keeping their data secure and migrating to the cloud smoothly. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case.
Working with a HIPAA-certified service provider doesn’t make your business HIPAA-compliant. It just serves as a promise to keep your data safe — a promise any cloud provider should be able to make.
See our HIPAA compliance checklist for ePHI
ServerCentral has a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement that ensures compliance with our customers’ HIPAA needs. That’s the same promise you get with a HIPAA-certified provider, but when you partner with a provider that works across industries, you get so much more.
We learn from every company we work with — including financial services firms, e-commerce providers and hundreds of other companies that depend on 24/7 service and total security to function. We’ll apply all that knowledge as we plan your migration — discussing the best ways to host and optimize your customer relationship management software, EMR platform, your patient data and all your other business elements that can benefit from cloud storage.
How healthcare cloud security can improve by looking to enterprise cloud
Many healthcare companies assume their apps are more complex than average, but the reality is that apps across the board are similar in how difficult they are to migrate, manage and optimize.
When you think about it, electronic medical record (EMR) software is really just enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for healthcare.
Just as in business, the key to keeping these systems secure is proper planning in the migration stage. When we develop a migration plan, we work with our partner to make sure every piece of their infrastructure is documented. It’s imperative that we know where every app and piece of data is, and who owns it. Only then can we start to determine what level of security each piece needs, which pieces interact and where we might find weak links in our HIPAA-compliant chain.
If even one sector is overlooked during the migration process, we’ve seen it create issues for security and functionality down the road. That’s why we have plenty of tools to make sure everything is mapped, organized and clear across teams, so no one is ever left in the dark.
Let the companies worth billions find the best ways to get 24/7 uptime and other benefits of cloud computing
Don’t reinvent the wheel may be a cliché, but letting someone else invest in a solution is just good sense. We’ve been through hundreds of cloud migrations, and we can use those collected learnings to benefit you.
Take 24/7 uptime. In a hospital, making sure systems are always running is truly a matter of life or death.
Patients can’t just hold their emergencies until after a cloud migration is complete or a server is updated.
Your team needs access to everything at all times.
In healthcare, that’s actually true, but business leaders certainly believe the same is true of them. Just look at trading firms, who may lose millions of dollars if there’s just a minute of downtime. Our work with high-pressure businesses means we have a thoroughly tested and vetted system for providing 24/7 uptime to our customers. Natural disasters, power outages, human error — we’ve planned for all of it and we have backups in place to keep anything from taking your data and applications offline.
The same can’t be said of your on-prem servers, which are just as vulnerable to disaster as the rest of your building. With a cloud migration, you can be confident that you’ll have access to everything, from anywhere, immediately. We’ll work with you to get siloed systems communicating with each other, reducing data entry and paperwork in favor of seamless experiences that improve outcomes for everyone. These services aren’t part of our healthcare-specific offering — they’re part of our promise to every partner. You’ll get an infrastructure that just works.
The benefits of cloud computing in healthcare are limited only by your goals
When we help our partners move to the cloud, we start our conversations by asking what they hope to accomplish. The cloud is a net advantage for your business — but you can choose the specific benefits you see during your infrastructure migration. As we plan your migration, we keep those goals front-and-center, making sure everything we do brings you closer to realizing them.
Cloud migration is a big undertaking — but the opportunities it offers to improve your business are even bigger. With partners like Deft, you’ll get all of the best practices in healthcare cloud migrations, and all of the best practices for business. The result is a secure, reliable cloud you can depend on and build from.
