What’s cloud got to do with it?
I’m sure you realise it, we’re all in the cloud right!
Just pause for a moment and reflect upon how many online applications you use daily; I personally was staggered by my own apps usage.
From listening to music on my way into work, controlling the central heating at home, reading a magazine, accessing and editing documents in real-time with colleagues on my laptop, to booking a taxi to the train station, I constantly find myself immersed in apps. Take music as an example, it’s interesting to see the way in which the experience has evolved over time, facilitated by technology. From owning over 100 vinyl records to owning 100s of CDs, the Walkman followed by the MP3 player, to now having access to over 30 million songs anytime, anywhere on my phone, demonstrates some of the impact technology has had on my personal live.
Similarly, in the movie industry, we used to hire video, take it back and get another one, then DVDs and boxsets and only ever watching them once, to now streaming to our heart’s content – and not just movies.
A key enabler behind much of this evolution, is cloud, bringing ‘anytime, anyplace – on-demand’ access. As a result of the evolution of services in our personal lives, we’ve come to expect the same speed, convenience and access in our everyday lives. Certainly, there have been significant digital innovations in the receiving and giving of healthcare. However, in my opinion, there’s still a long way to go to really leverage and deliver a modern patient-centric service through a similar seamless journey to the one we’ve clearly done with the services in our personal lives.
We all know IT in healthcare is complex; lots of components not helped by lots of applications, a confusing infrastructure and a cloud-first policy thrown into the mix. Whilst I’m totally onboard with the vision, I think we need to take a step back and realise that the move to cloud is not a single step – you wouldn’t change the engine on a plane mid-flight would you? It’s important to recognise that the way forward with cloud for organisations is by adopting a blended methodology. By that I mean carrying out an assessment of the current state and then defining a clear cloud migration strategy. It’s perfectly acceptable to go for the low-hanging fruit to get some quick wins, such as using cloud for DR (DRaaS) or investigating cloud storage options. This approach provides opportunities to move us in the right direction.
Having worked directly with many NHS organisations trying to innovate and move to a cloud model, what we often find resonates is delivering cloud migration into four distinct phases.
Typically, within a health organisation you will find (1) legacy IT. From a technical perspective this may be harder to migrate due to the technologies utilised and the need to be tightly coupled with other servers. Therefore, these applications need to be handled with kid-gloves. Other services are more comfortable on a (2) cloud-hosted model and can help to provide front-line hospital staff, nurses and doctors with the information they require anytime, anywhere.
But this is the legacy stuff, on the flip side we see cutting-edge innovation coming through health in the form of shiny new electronic document management systems (EDMS). The latest incarnations of these can be best placed in the cloud using (3) cloud native technologies to truly benefit from elastic, on-demand and scalable infrastructure. Finally, we all desire intelligent use of technologies to self-diagnose and early-diagnose diseases utilising and combining data to identify trends and themes. This already exists in parts of health and care such as (4) IoT designed to capture real time data and the emergence of virtual doctors.
Healthcare is complex right? From a technology perspective, when you break it down into stages along a journey it can become simpler. The reality is that IT in health is varied, but what’s required is a systematic approach to innovation and an understanding that although cloud is a key enabler, it’s not always the first step. For legacy systems, it might be that not all of the infrastructure is still required, so assessing, planning and then migrating to the cloud will provide better results. Once on the cloud, these applications can then be either optimised or transformed to deliver the modern healthcare services expected by today’s citizens.
This is what my team and I do here at UKCloud. We introduce organisations to this concept of journey and help them every step of the way, whilst breaking myths that cloud is more expensive or less secure. We absolutely recognise the technology complexities facing health and care organisations, which is why our staged approach provides our customers with confidence that moving to the cloud can help to de-risk, increase compliance and deliver highly-available, convenient patient care to all.