7 Tips To Ensure Healthcare Customers' Cloud Transitions Go Smoothly

By The Business Solutions Network

Healthcare providers are making the move to the cloud. Help them find a cloud offering that won’t make them regret their decision later on.

Whenever Business Solutions surveys channel executives about the most significant trends and opportunities in healthcare IT, cloud solutions and services almost always top the list. There are a myriad of studies that confirm this, too. For example, a 2014 cloud survey from HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) revealed that 83 percent of healthcare provider organizations are using cloud services. A more recent study from MarketsandMarkets predicts the global adoption of cloud services in healthcare will grow from $3.73 billion in 2015 to nearly $9.5 billion in 2020.

Despite the positive momentum of IT workloads moving to the cloud, the results don’t always live up to companies’ original expectations. After polling attendees at its datacenter conference, Gartner discovered that 95 percent had problems with their private cloud deployments. Additional studies, such as “Casualties of Cloud Wars: Customers Are Paying the Price,” conducted by Enterprise Management Associates, corroborated Gartner’s findings. Its research suggested that enterprises moving to the cloud were experiencing a “staggering” number of project failure rates.

Such debacles and shortcomings don’t have to be the norm for you and your healthcare clients. To ensure a successful cloud experience for your customers, follow the seven tips below from cloud experts at Egenera and Secure Infrastructure & Services.

Tip #1: Choose A HIPAA-Compliant Cloud Provider
One of the most important concerns your healthcare customers have is that they are HIPAA-compliant. If you’re going to back up or move their PHI (protected health information) to a cloud data center, the first thing you need to do is ensure the cloud provider is HIPAA-compliant, says Pete Manca, CEO of Egenera. “HIPAA-compliant providers follow strict security standards such as ISO 27001, which is an international specification for an information security management system [ISMS]. This specification includes all legal, physical, and technical controls involved in an organization’s information risk management processes. This is a musthave starting point for IT solutions providers that want to provide cloud services to healthcare companies.”

Tip #2: Confirm Data Center Availability
Cloud data centers use varying levels of physical security and protection, which is indicated by their tier level. A tier-one data center, for example, offers only nonredundant capacity components and single uplink and servers. Additionally, a tier-one data center guarantees only 99 percent (i.e., two nines) uptime, which equates to more than 7 hours of downtime a month. A tier-two data center provides a little better protection (redundant capacity components), but it still offers only two nines of availability (99.741 percent). “For healthcare clients, a tier-three data center, which features dual-powered equipment and multiple uplinks, is a necessity,” says Hal Schwartz, CEO of Secure Infrastructure & Services.

Tier-three data centers also guarantee 99.982 percent availability, which equates to less than 8 minutes per month of downtime. The highest level is tier-four, which adds full fault tolerance (including dual power) to uplinks, storage, HVAC systems, and servers, guaranteeing 99.995 percent availability (less than 3 minutes of downtime per month).

Tip #3: Read The Service Level Agreement (SLA) Fine Print
One of the biggest cloud pitfalls comes from subpar postimplementation support. In many cases, this problem can be mitigated by taking a closer look at the provider’s SLA in advance. And don’t be fooled by blanket claims of 24/7 support, warns Manca. “Some cloud providers send initial support calls to low-cost, offshore contact centers, staffed with nontechnical customer service reps. You can waste hours dealing with an incompetent rep before being escalated to someone who can help. Prior to choosing a cloud provider, be sure to confirm you’ll be able to reach a high-level tech support person right away.”

Tip #4: Avoid Bandwidth, Performance Bottlenecks
Although a data center may technically be “available,” if the data link to the center reaches capacity, users will experience a slowdown in system response times, and productivity will suffer. “This is especially important for hospitals that utilize high-bandwidth telehealth services to allow physicians to collaborate prior to and during difficult procedures,” says Schwartz. “Make sure the cloud provider supports multiple bandwidth providers and that it can guarantee your customers will have enough bandwidth when they need it. Additionally, the cloud provider should be able to guarantee specific performance minimums per GB or TB. This metric is represented as IOPS [input/output operations per second] per GB/TB and sometimes referred to as performance per core or performance per memory.”

Tip #5: Ensure Data Residency
One of the big controversies with cloud computing in recent years has involved data residency (also referred to as data sovereignty). Data residency refers to the physical or geographic location of an organization’s data or information. The problem sometimes occurs with cloud providers’ backup strategies. For example, in the event of a natural disaster, a cloud provider needs to be able to fail over to a backup data center that’s far enough away that the backup wouldn’t be affected by the same disaster. Sometimes the failover data center is located in a different country than the primary data center, and that’s where data residency can become a problem. “It’s important to work with a cloud provider that has a global presence and offers global support, but make sure the provider can meet your customers’ data residency requirements, too,” says Manca.

Tip #6: Don’t Forget About Scalability
Another downside of using a lower tier data center occurs whenever one needs to make changes. “Choose a cloud provider that makes it easy to scale up [performance] and out [storage],” says Schwartz. “One way to ensure scalability is to find out what kind of storage the provider is using. A good cloud provider will use enterprise-level storage, which offers the ability to increase storage capacity using quality of service tools instead of changing drives.”

Tip #7: Migration Services Are A Must
Going to the cloud typically happens in three phases: planning, migration, and operation. It’s in the second phase, migration, where the highest chances of lost productivity and downtime can occur. To mitigate this risk, ensure the cloud provider offers and supports cloud migration tools. “Cloud migration tools enable end users to operate on-premise and in the cloud simultaneously by synching data and workloads until the project has been completed,” says Manca. “Another benefit some cloud migration tools offer is the ability to remotely configure customer endpoints instead of having to physically touch each workstation and make network IP address changes.”

It seems like only a few years ago that the biggest challenge IT solutions providers faced with the cloud was convincing their customers that it offered advantages over on-premise computing. Today, that’s no longer the case. Even companies in highly regulated industries like healthcare see the potential of moving data, apps, and IT workloads to the cloud. The new challenge is helping customers choose a cloud provider that lives up to its potential. Following the tips outlined earlier can help you home in on a cloud provider that can set your customers — and you — up for long-term success.