Moving to the Cloud

Historically healthcare, education, government organizations and SMB’s  have been reluctant to even partially adopt cloud technology and understandably so. Heavy regulatory requirements and privacy concerns stipulate that they are extremely protective of information. With mandates around health information exchange (HIE) and the proliferation of moving massive amounts of data at real-time speed, organizations must at least start thinking about and become more familiar and eventually comfortable with cloud technology.

IT as a Service (ITaaS) organizations who offer cloud services and have experience working within these industries understand the tight security requirements relative HIPAA, PCI and others. As a result, providers of cloud or hosting services also have to meet these security requirements and document that they are in compliance. Organizations should ensure that any cloud provider they are contracting with meet these requirements.

Cloud technology gives these organizations the ability to scale their existing IT infrastructure as new data and larger amounts of data storage needs are presented, at lower costs.

The main benefits of cloud services are:

Cost Effectiveness

• Shifts expensive capital costs to lower operational costs

• Reduces or eliminates upfront costs, maintenance and upgrade costs for hardware scalability

• Organizations or departments can be added with no new hardware

• Modifications are managed with little to no burden on existing IT resources

• Data is replicated, backed-up and stored in multiple locations

Successful ITaaS providers like HNcBNc are able to offer a variety of ways to access information via cloud technology in addition to providing the necessary bandwidth needed to transport the massive amounts of data. In discussing a move to the cloud organizations should make sure the provider meets all regulatory requirements, detail where the data will be stored (data center location) and provide the necessary communication pathway (broadband network) to transmit the data.

Rodney Brown

Mr. Brown brings extensive experience building companies and leading sales, operations and service organizations in technology and healthcare. He is the Executive Director of HealthNet connect and CEO of HNcBNc.

The views and opinions on this blog are my own.