Hybrid Cloud Digital Transformation for Healthcare Organizations

Because of the highly sensitive nature of health data, healthcare organizations have been slower to move to the cloud. To keep up with today’s dynamic and ever-evolving marketplace, it’s more important than ever for healthcare organizations to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.

In healthcare, digital transformation refers to the practice of using digital technologies to create or modify existing workflow processes and patient experiences. Digital transformation can help organizations keep up with changing business needs and market requirements while allowing them to focus on the monetization of digital assets.

By combining the benefits of private cloud, public cloud and on-premises infrastructure, hybrid cloud technology can improve the scalability, agility, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of health system applications and data. This efficiency can take the healthcare workflow pipeline to a faster, more secure level.

Here are a few of the benefits of leveraging hybrid cloud technology for healthcare organizations of all sizes.

Because each medical workflow has needs and requirements specific to their healthcare organization, ensuring that their infrastructure is secure, scalable and diverse in its application is essential.

Hybrid cloud provides the scalability health systems need by integrating public cloud resources with a health system’s existing infrastructure. This allows the transformation of critical operational workflows, boosting efficiencies and lowering operating costs, which are both crucial to scalability and sustainability. When used effectively, hybrid cloud solutions can provide healthcare organizations a surplus of resources on demand while maximizing their existing infrastructure investments.

Many healthcare organizations have adopted a cloud-smart mindset in order to remain competitive and responsive in a marketplace where flexibility and agility is key.

In a hybrid cloud model, healthcare organizations are able to deploy workloads in private or public clouds and move between them as needs and budgets change — giving them greater flexibility to arrange and manage operations in addition to more data deployment options to host applications where they are best suited according to their specific business requirements. This flexibility also provides healthcare organizations the ability to move certain workloads to a public cloud when accommodating sudden bursts of high demand on their private cloud.

A hybrid cloud environment can also give healthcare organizations the power to nimbly respond to changing conditions or opportunities, allowing organizations to quickly provision and scale resources up or down as needed. The need to adapt and change direction quickly is a core principle of a digital business, and healthcare organizations must use public clouds, private clouds and on-premises resources to gain the agility they need for a competitive advantage.

The flexibility and agility that hybrid cloud solutions offer can be an optimal way to tie legacy applications and infrastructure together with modern workloads.

A hybrid cloud environment can also allow healthcare organizations to optimize limited budgets and help balance cost, performance and availability as their needs evolve.

Migrating workloads to scalable clouds allows healthcare organizations more flexible capacity as well as the added cost optimization of dynamic pricing based on “pay-as-you-go” consumption models, rather than fixed prices. Resources can be brought online quickly and decommissioned just as easily.

Because healthcare workflows can be very intricate, cloud infrastructure can be less taxing on budgets than solely maintaining on-premises infrastructure, especially with disaster recovery environments.

Offering all the advantages of on-premises combined with the scalability, flexibility, agility and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud, it’s no wonder a hybrid cloud model has become the preferred infrastructure model for healthcare organizations looking to digitally transform their environments.

Keeping up with current digital health strategies and deploying new technology effectively can help your healthcare organization become more competitive and adaptable, which will help future-proof your business model and improve patient outcomes in the process.