Is Healthcare ready for Cloud?

Is Healthcare ready for the cloud?

The cost savings and the flexibility offered by the cloud is driving majority of the organizations in every industry to have a serious look at the cloud computing. Although lot of work is being done around the cloud arena, the highly compliance oriented industries such as health care and financial services are reluctant to migrate to cloud computing for the security and data availability reasons.

A recent study conducted by BridgeHead software shows that more than 80% of respondents are concerned about cloud security and availability. The article with the survey link (available till mid March 2010) is available here.

Even though with the growing concerns of the cloud among the healthcare industry, there are few factors that make business sense for the healthcare industry. Some of them are discussed in this article:

Moving non-critical applications to cloud:

Ever growing compliance requirements keeps the healthcare IT department busy at all the time. During these economic times with tighter budget and lesser resources, it makes sense to move some of the non-critical, non-compliance applications to the cloud. It gives more time to the IT staff to concentrate on the critical, compliance related applications which also provide competitive advantage against their competitors. The lesser Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) enjoyed by moving to cloud can be passed on to their customers by reducing their costs thus providing another competitive advantage.

Moving the risk outside the organization:

Efficient risk management in healthcare involves on-going in-house investment and resources. There are few cloud providers who are specialized and very efficient in handling risks in the industry. In those cases it makes sense to outsource them to the cloud providers to free up internal resources and save cost.

Either way, the key thing to remember in any industry is selection of cloud vendor. Do your research and understand your cloud providers’ SLA and their infrastructure.


There are interesting articles in this area and few of them are listed below:

http://newsblaze.com/story/2010030208042800001.we/topstory.html

http://healthcare.zdnet.com/?p=1025