Cloud vs. On-Prem: Healthcare Organizations Can Find Key Solutions for Their Workloads

Ensuring Security and Compliance No Matter the Location

Security and compliance are mission-critical considerations for healthcare organizations, which must abide by industry regulations protecting patients’ sensitive health information. While a healthcare organization may need to store some sensitive patient care data locally for a certain number of years, it can host other data, such as billing and claims, in the cloud “if the data can be deidentified before moving to the cloud,” Turk says.

Security is the top reason healthcare IT leaders may decide to keep an application on-premises rather than in the cloud, according to the CDW survey. To address this concern, cloud providers should follow security best practices such as the five pillars of zero trust and network segmentation, which is easier in the cloud than on-premises. Some cloud providers also offer extended support that healthcare organizations don’t get on-premises.

CONSIDER: Here are the five ways healthcare organizations can maximize cloud assessments.

Consider the Cost and Resources Required for Each Infrastructure

One advantage of the cloud is that organizations don’t have to manage the servers themselves or expend the resources to do so. When deciding on the cloud versus on-premises, healthcare organizations should identify the storage, power, cooling, water and resourcing requirements of their on-premises workloads compared with the long-term costs of the cloud. “It becomes an ROI decision,” Turk says.

He advises healthcare organizations to ask themselves a question: “Do we have the skills and resources available locally to manage a large on-premises infrastructure? If the answer is no, cloud presents an opportunity, at additional cost.”

Evaluate Healthcare Processing Needs in Cloud Migration Decisions

Consider the data and processing needs of any given workload. One case in point: “Analytics data requires a huge amount of computing and AI, so that’s a really good candidate for cloud computing,” Turk says. “But if there is no need for major computational power, it could be housed locally.”

For healthcare organizations, edge computing, or processing medical data as close to the source as possible, also might not qualify for the cloud, he adds.

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The Cloud Can Improve Availability

Cloud vendors have an economy of scale, so they can provide availability more efficiently and cost-effectively. “Availability can definitely improve with the cloud,” Turk says.

Even so, healthcare organizations should identify the workloads they absolutely cannot afford to lose access to.

“If you really cannot dare to lose your most critical applications, even for minutes, then you might think twice about whether they qualify for the cloud,” he says.

How Do Hybrid Environments Impact Interoperability?

A healthcare organization can have hundreds of applications. If some of those move to the cloud and others remain on-premises, the organization must understand how that hybrid environment can impact interoperability as well as latency.

With on-premises devices, consider their entire data journey to decide if any of the software on that journey can or should belong in the cloud. For example, in a healthcare lab, a specimen is placed in various analyzers to run tests, which generate results that middleware translates and then sends to the patient’s electronic health records (EHR). In that journey, Turk says, “only the EHR should belong in the cloud, because everything else has to be close to the instruments and localized in the lab.”

DISCOVER: How can a modern hybrid cloud strategy support healthcare’s AI initiatives?

Managing Healthcare Workloads in the Cloud Through Partnerships

According to the CDW survey, half of all respondents across industries say they manage their cloud environments very effectively. But that’s true of only 43% of healthcare IT leaders.

Healthcare lags behind other industries in part due to a lack of staffing, which can impact an organization’s ability to manage the cloud effectively. That’s why many healthcare organizations are turning to managed services, which help use the cloud more effectively at scale than an organization could on its own. Of the respondents that effectively manage their cloud environments, more than two-thirds (68%) cite cloud management platforms as a key factor.

Organizations might choose Software as a Service solutions or opt for vendors that host large systems, such as EHRs, in the cloud. One advantage of managed services, Turk says, is that “the vendor takes the responsibility for your entire suite of products.”