Embracing the cloud

As I have written about previously, CIOs across the country are telling me that expectations for IT delivery are at an all time high.    More must be delivered faster, cheaper, and with greater usability. After a recent EHR rollout, a number of clinicians told me they were disappointed with the project.  I asked them what criteria they used to measure success – their answer was that they hoped to get home an hour earlier,  make more money, and be less stressed.   Sounds good to me! The cloud does not solve every healthcare IT problem, but does enhance agility, reduce capital expenditures, and enables IT to focus more on optimization than procurement.  Currently I oversee about 250 physical servers in data centers operated by BIDMC and other hospitals.   The lease on the building housing our primary data center expires in a few years.    My belief is that by the time we move, we will not need to build or operate our own data center. We’ll embrace the public cloud. Many companies talk about moving to the public cloud, but as one attorney recently told me, they have not read the fine print.    Transitioning from your own data center requires careful planning.   Here are a few elements of the journey thus far. I’ll stratify the issues into technical concerns, security concerns, and legal concerns. At the technical level, what are you buying?  I¹ve classified types of cloud offerings as: *Infrastructure as a service – your stuff hosted somewhere e...
Source: Mass Device - Category: Medical Equipment Authors: Tags: Blog Life as a Health Care CIO Source Type: news