Top Considerations for your Healthcare Cloud Networking Strategy

Healthcare organizations must keep pace with digital care initiatives. This is not a choice. The nation, and the globe for that matter, are neck-deep in a pandemic and the lifeline for this is the cloud. Dramatic? Maybe a little but, according to Gartner, by 2022 75% of healthcare provider organizations will have a formal cloud strategy in place. The success of digital transformation initiatives is integral in overcoming the obstacles of today, and victory starts with a sound gameplan.

Gartner highlights a number of key challenges linked to the cloud. Too many firms are adopting ad hoc cloud purchasing practices, making centralized planning, and management a herculean task. In addition, the WFH, virtual reality of today is creating demand for healthcare organizations to quickly support new cloud-native applications.

Then we move to legacy infrastructure challenged to support rising cloud business demands. It’s difficult for a VCR to play a DVD. Central to the shift of on-prem to the cloud is transitioning from CAPEX to OPEX and embrace the subscription-based model, however, CFOs simply don’t want to hear it, showing frustration when modern CIOs even suggest the transition.

Best practice, as outlined by Gartner, is connecting business and clinical vision and cloud solutions with clarity and guidance for all. Healthcare organizations must include risk mitigation, and once completed, healthcare CIOs require support from leadership to follow through.

With no cloud strategy in place, the network quickly becomes a patchwork of disparate services with increasing complexity, underscoring how integral it is to take a step back and develop a cloud strategy in line with long term business strategies.

Cloud-based Infrastructure management is growing in popularity as it enables network admins to view and operate their networks without the need to maintain or install management software while still retaining ownership.

Cloud-managed networking is exploding, growing nine times faster than traditional networking. Automation of onboarding and enablement of remote management capabilities join the rise of complexity in networks as key drivers for its adoption ascension. Significant innovation is creating improved reliability, usability, and security in recent years, AI/ML-driven insights are proactively protecting network performance and consistency. The network is no longer just about delivering Wi-Fi, components must reflect that.

Ok, so where does that leave us? Simple. Healthcare CIOs look for availability in your cloud networking. Extreme offers 100% uptime with rapid feature and bug fix leveraging CI/CD. In addition to availability, Duration of data retention is critical to advancing operational intelligence. The industry standard for data storage is 30 days, but Extreme Networks provides unlimited retention. We’ve mentioned data, but what about security? Going hand and hand with compliance, security is central to a successful deployment. Extreme notes the industry’s only IS027001 certified cloud, supporting GDPR and CCPA.

Flexibility can prove a pain point. Avoid additional obstacles by selecting a cloud-agnostic, deployment agnostic provider with simple, portable licensing practices.

It’s not that healthcare CIOs aren’t putting their best foot forward in the cloud journey. It’s that most healthcare CIOs don’t fully understand the value of crafting the appropriate cloud networking strategy.

I’ll close with an example from Extreme. We manage over one million devices, with more than 25,000 daily admin logins, ingesting 4.6 billion management messages per day with customer network devices sending an average of 6 petabytes of data a day. Organized data is information, learning from information is knowledge and applied knowledge is intelligence.

Data is power.