SOLUTION PROVIDER Q&A
Cloud Computing and the New Horizons of Digital Strategy
It took cloud computing longer to catch on in healthcare than most other industries, partly because of security concerns. Do you think that the vendor industry has sufficiently addressed provider leaders’ data security concerns
at this point? First, it’s true that cloud computing took longer to catch on in healthcare than in other industries. I think there were security concerns. But it’s also true that healthcare tends to be a decade or so behind every other industry in adopting information technol- ogy in general, though in clinical technology adoption we lead the world. The vendor community has very legiti-
mate security concerns around patient data and privacy, but if we look at cloud ecosystems, they’re arguably more secure than data in a healthcare organization’s own data centers. Look at the sophisticated tech- nology that Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud have put in place to protect their cloud environments against the same threats that are attacking hospitals and health systems. The resources that cloud ecosystem vendors bring to bear far exceed what even some of the largest individual healthcare organizations can do.
What are the biggest concerns that providers share with you around how cloud computing
works generally, and its efficacy? Cloud ecosystems are very comprehensive and can be very complex beasts. One of the concerns that we hear from different orga- nizations is that the different services and different tools that cloud ecosystem vendors have available vary in degrees of sophistica- tion and maturity. So, for example, if they are very familiar with working with Informatica for data integration use cases, they know that our tools have been around for a really long time, and that our cloud tools are based on those original tools. I also think there’s still a misconcep-
tion that you move to the cloud because it’s cheaper, when in actuality it’s because it provides higher value: you get to do more things with greater agility and solve
problems that might have been unsolvable at any price previously. In fact, you really need to manage the use of the cloud because it’s so easy to consume, so as to not let your spending get out of control.
What are the areas of greatest opportunity for the cloud computing sector in the next two
years? First and foremost, it’s moving data work- loads to the cloud. We see this trend gath- ering momentum across all industries, but specifically in healthcare as on-premise enterprise data warehouse systems reach end-of-life and a decision needs to be made about what to do next. Moving the data warehouse to the cloud is absolutely the right approach. Another opportunity is cloud application
modernization, moving from on-premise applications to cloud versions of those appli- cations and integrating them with APIs. Specifically, in healthcare, let’s move away from our messaging-based integration to API-based integration. This will bring enor- mous benefits around flexibility, agility, and time to value. We see that with customers like Valley Health—they were able to imple- ment a telemedicine solution within a couple of weeks using API integration, as opposed to something that was perhaps unsolvable in a messaging-integration world.
How are business transactions, including mergers and acquisitions, among provider organizations, impacting the adoption of cloud platforms? Are
they accelerating that adoption? Unequivocally, yes. If I’ve got two, three, or even four different systems that are all operating in silos and I need to modern- ize those, I’m moving to the cloud. There is absolutely no need to modernize an on-prem system as is. From a data management perspective,
the same holds true—you are aggregating and consolidating data across those merged organizations, and you want to do it quickly and in a combined manner, and that dic- tates that you want to use cloud. Cloud is
Richard Cramer Chief Healthcare Strategist Informatica
really the opportunity to be more agile, more powerful, more scalable. It’s much better- suited to the workloads than on-premises solutions are. So anytime you are looking to modernize, you want to be modernizing to the cloud, and M&A is a driver of that.
How will cloud computing evolve
forward in the next two years? Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will feature prominently in advances in cloud-native data management. Healthcare has massive amounts of highly complex data residing across a breadth of diverse systems—and cloud-native, AI-driven automation is the only way to get value from it and manage it effectively. Over the course of the next two years, we expect to see healthcare organizations shifting from piloting to operationalizing AI and ML. The good news is that the incorporation of AI into data management tools and applica- tions is maturing rapidly. These capabilities do not need to be independently procured; rather, they should be seamlessly integrated within the data management capabilities of the enterprise.
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MARCH/APRIL 2021 |
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