Leveraging the Cloud in Healthcare

Migrating to the Cloud

There are a multitude of tasks to complete when migrating to the cloud but the benefits for cost saving and time are significant when properly optimised. There are three important steps to consider when migrating to the cloud. 1: plan & prepare, 2: choosing your cloud environment and 3: migrating your data & applications.

1: Planning & preparation
Large migration projects require a significant amount of technical planning and decision making. Having a specialist available who has a depth of experience working across different sectors and projects can be critical to the success of the project.

There are two ways you can migrate your application, a “lift and shift” approach where you move your on-premise application to the cloud. You make little to or no changes to the servers and the only application changes you make are to allow it to run in the new environment. This can be seen as the ‘least risk’ option but you fail to benefit from the optimisation and automation tools the cloud provides.

The second is a deeper integration where you modify your application during the migration process to take advantage of services within the cloud. As mentioned above this can be automation, dynamic load balancing or serverless computing for example. If conducted correctly significant savings can be made in both time and money with an automated system far easier to manage over the long term. This is the approach that ADM Cloudtech recommend for the Healthcare sector, if you are moving to the Cloud it’s best to fully utilise all the benefits available and maximise your future return on investment.

2: Single or Multi-cloud?
Often, single cloud models are for a single service or application, such as email or a customer relationship management system. They can be less complex than taking a multi-cloud approach but depending on your business requirements it could result with a less optimal solution.

With Multi-cloud environments you can benefit from a best of breed approach, choosing the Cloud providers who specialise in services better suited to your needs. A secondary benefit is the reduction of vendor lock-in by minimising dependence on any one provider, this can decrease costs and increase flexibility.

3: Migrating your data & applications
If you have planned your migration carefully, the actual migration process will go smoothly and quickly.

The Healthcare sector will generally have large databases and applications which will require a service such as AWS Snowball or MS Databox. These services reduce risk whilst providing a cost effective and secure transfer of data.

Once you have migrated your data, there are other important considerations to take into account. The cloud is optimised for dynamic resource allocation so to truly benefit from the cloud make sure you have a plan for distributing resources to your applications.

Cloud Managed Services

Why are Managed Services important to the healthcare sector?
Once migrated there are further benefits to utilise, simple or repetitive tasks such as updating firmware of hardware devices, scheduling security group updates or deploying new resources can all be automated. This will allow your staff to focus on mission critical digital initiatives and eliminate human error that could occur when deploying a huge number of repetitive tasks.

Choosing a Cloud Partner

When choosing a digital solution company ensure that they have proven experience and success when it comes to leveraging the capability of the Cloud through automation. Check the company website for relevant blogs and case-studies, request guidance from a professional association or check their partner status with providers such as AWS, MS Azure and Google.

Automation is now a fundamental element of many cloud-based services and being able to utilise this is extremely important to realising the benefits of the Cloud.

As mentioned earlier there are so many services available from the main Cloud providers that it’s not always easy to choose the right ones to optimise your configuration. This can lead to paying for services that are under-utilised, and there may be other services better suited for the task.

We recommend choosing a company that has partner status to main Cloud providers and has certified Cloud architects. This will ensure they have the knowledge and experience to make your Cloud journey a successful one.

How do you find this information? It should be listed on their website but we recommend going directly to a Cloud provider, for example: https://aws.amazon.com/partners/find/