According to Gartner, 92% of healthcare providers are planning to implement distributed cloud technologies by 2025. Despite that, some companies still feel leery about cloud hosting and associate cloud migration with unnecessary risks.
The development of cyber security measures, as well as the flexibility and accessibility of the clouds, have won more businesses to the cloudy side. In this post, healthtech firms read about the risks of cloud migration and evaluate the chances of success.
Why migrate to the cloud?
In spite of the challenges that might occur, more and more healthcare organizations commence digital transformation to improve their performance and stay tuned with modern trends.
The experts from Deloitte admit that the healthcare tendency is shifting from treatment to boosting general well-being and better health in the population.
Cloud technologies enable both doctors and patients to participate actively in this process.
For instance, cloud-based electronic health records (EHR) are accessible from any medical center or hospital.
This means that every new medical provider will complete patients’ health histories, which guarantees sustainable health support. Healthtech firms decide to migrate to .NET core as such solutions are more convenient and adaptable to their clients.
Developers use the .NET core to build cross-platform applications. Internal IT teams adjust them to corporate systems seamlessly and train the staff to benefit from them.
Experts from the Belitsoft software development company admit that the applications that run on the .NET core platform are easily customizable and scalable.
According to Dmitry Baraishuk, the Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) with 20 years of experience in healthtech, cloud migration is closely tied with the timely modernization of legacy applications.
Old systems often require some modernization before transferring to the cloud. Different modernization strategies (rehosting, refactoring, rebuilding, etc.) imply different costs, values, and time frames.
For example, businesses may choose to achieve value with little effort, as they will not need to develop a new app from scratch. Or, they may decide to redesign their existing software to receive better performance.
Challenges that might occur with cloud technologies
Cloud cost management
There might be many reasons for cost escalations and consequently many methods of tackling them. Smaller businesses benefit from the pay-per-use model. The resources of the internal IT teams are not static. For example, cloud solutions scale at peak times, when the number of visitors is growing, and shrink at activity lulls.
Seasonal outbreaks of infections force medical institutions to increase their digital capacity. Cloud vendors provide wider storage, networking, or computing powers upon request.
As a result, medical institutions pay only for the resources they use. However, for large corporations, it might be difficult to track the cloud requirements all the time.
They should learn to monitor and predict cloud anomalies that influence costs. Here are the main three reasons that lead to cost fluctuations:
- Code issues: unregulated code requests, malicious procedures, and development errors. They consume resources unnoticeably, and organizations risk having a cloud sticker shock.
- Human factor: here the problem might be anything from an error in the code to a negligent attitude of the staff. Proper mentoring and training can help employees turn the programs off if they do not need them, detect suspicious emails, and never open them.
- Cybersecurity threats: during the previous four years, healthcare has remained the top aim for cybersecurity attacks. Developers use a number of cloud security measures to protect sensitive healthcare data. For example, access rights, network segmentation, and behavior monitoring are among them.
Cloud cost management solutions aid in tracking the anomalies mentioned above. They analyze the usage patterns, offer ways to save costs, and notify in cases of unusual spending behavior.
Experienced healthtech consultants can assess each case separately and offer such solutions to protect businesses against budget waste.
Limited control
The infrastructure of the cloud software belongs to the cloud providers. On the one hand, it relieves the pain of maintenance off the shoulders of the corporate IT staff. On the reverse side, the company may feel removed from the possibility of internal management.
The storage of the cloud may be perceived as something ethereal and cause an unresponsive attitude of the employees.
The solution to this trouble lies in the “shared responsibility” model. In simple terms, it is the process of determining how far the visibility and control of the data by the medical provider stretches. For example, AWS differentiates between the “security of the cloud” and the “security in the cloud.”
The first is the area of AWS responsibility. It includes the infrastructure, hardware, software, and networking. The second is the responsibility of the client.
Customers may decide to perform cloud security configuration and management tasks. Even encryption options and data classification can be made by the client’s internal IT team, ensuring data safety.
Another option may be storing the medical data on hybrid clouds when part of the information is kept on-premises. This way, medical institutions feel more control over their data.
Lack of specialists
Medical enterprises lack the expertise and resources to hire competent IT staff. As a rule, internal IT departments are bombarded with routine tasks and do not have the opportunity to tackle cloud migration and perform it with excellent results. Besides, cloud migration is a temporary task.
Cloud engineers may not be necessary for a medical center after the migration.
That is why dealing with Microsoft, Google, or AWS partners and augmenting the internal team with outsourced experts is the solution that medical providers choose.
Individual developers or fully-packed delivery teams guide the migration process, fix bugs along the way, and customize all the apps.
The tendency towards digital transformation in healthcare results in the fact that IT experts and CINOs become more involved in the internal operations of medical centers and hospitals. They aim to make programs and tools convenient for the end users, i.e., doctors and patients.
This approach creates active engagement of all the stakeholders in general well-being. Partnerships with technological giants as well as innovation centers inside hospitals and clinics bring cloud computing closer to the medical domain.
Final thoughts: to migrate or not to migrate?
Cloud migration is a process that holds benefits for medical organizations.
However, they may be discouraged by possible risks. The goal of a healthtech provider is to come up with a detailed migration roadmap, predict the challenges, and choose the solutions to handle them.
As a result, technological and medical businesses will cooperate to achieve improved health of the population.
