Infographic Evaluating Four Healthcare Cloud Options
By Insight Editor / 13 Feb 2020 / Topics: Cloud
Today, healthcare organizations are tasked with supporting growing patient populations and innovation while keeping costs low. Compare four healthcare cloud computing options that can rise to the challenge medical providers face.
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4 healthcare cloud options
The cloud offers flexibility, reliability and cost efficiency that can help healthcare organizations greatly improve patient outcomes. But which cloud platform should you choose? Review our analysis below to determine which solution might best help your organization enhance its IT infrastructure.
Cloud solution No. 1: Software as a Service (SaaS)
Adopting SaaS solutions is a great way to fill singular needs, like office productivity and predictive analytics. Both clinicians and administrators can securely access SaaS applications and files from any device, helping your organization support healthcare mobility. SaaS is also optimal for supporting growing user-bases as healthcare demands rise, but costs can easily increase.
Cloud solution No. 2: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
With IaaS providing the entire IT infrastructure, the healthcare organization remains in charge of its applications, data, operating system and development tools. Adopting IaaS gives your organization more flexibility to serve increasing patient demands. The platform is also great for hosting powerful IT resources, including big data analytics, web applications and more.
Note that adopting IaaS can be a significant undertaking. Legacy applications must be modernized for cloud readiness and successful adoption hinges on a thorough cloud migration strategy that includes governance, optimization, setup plans and more.
Cloud solution No. 3: Platform as a Service (PaaS)
By including the operating system and development tools, PaaS adds to the existing IaaS model. With it, your IT team would continue to oversee your clinical applications and patient data. There’s also less to manage under this model, which helps ensure reliable access to critical healthcare technologies hosted in the cloud solution.
With PaaS, coding time is generally minimal, simplifying application development and enabling IT teams to easily develop for multiple platforms, including mobile. PaaS also requires legacy application modernization and a robust cloud migration strategy.
Despite the high barrier to entry, IaaS and PaaS can ultimately be a cost-effective solution. Both platforms enable IT teams to quickly scale infrastructure resources to meet sudden demand and easily ramp down after.
Cloud solution No. 4: Private cloud
Adding the private cloud to your on-premises data center through virtualization can help ensure data security and simplify management. Your IT team will have complete control over the private cloud and can dedicate resources to applications that can’t have downtime.
Private cloud users will still need to spend time and budget on maintaining on-premises infrastructure. But by maximizing the use of each on-premises resource through virtualization, the private cloud increases IT efficiency and helps organizations modernize IT without having to undergo organizational transformation.
