Hybrid Clouds Fuel Choices For Health IT

Many healthcare companies are using a range of infrastructure services to meet their changing IT needs. This usually begins with storing data in an in-house data center then moving to collocation in an outsourced data center. This then may lead to a managed service; and later move to a cloud - such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform - and eventually to a hybrid cloud.

The notion of stages infers a complete transition over time, but healthcare companies may find that utilizing a variety of options is the best long-term approach. This is especially true with legacy systems which cannot easily take advantage of virtualization and flexible architectures.

Not all databases will operate efficiently in a virtualized cloud environment, and may need to remain “local” in a secure managed data center while their apps live in the cloud. Many healthcare applications use a hybrid architecture – accessing information from within a collocation facility and using a public cloud for alternative workloads (or applications).