How To Ensure An Effective Healthcare Cloud Migration

As the demands of IT infrastructure associated with healthcare organizations continue to grow, so too does the need to securely store vast amounts of data in a flexible and cost-effective manner. For healthcare organizations looking to adopt a new approach for storing and accessing digital assets, cloud migration can be a great option.

Cloud migration, which typically involves the movement of data from on-site data storage onto a cloud-based storage solution, present many enticing benefits for growing organizations. Within the healthcare field, cloud migration is becoming increasingly popular, especially as electronic health records (EHR) continue to grow in popularity throughout the industry.

However, deciding how to move all of the data utilized by a healthcare organization from onsite storage to the cloud, or from one cloud provider to another, is no small undertaking. Due in large part to the strict data privacy regulations surrounding healthcare-related data (i.e. HIPAA) and the realities of today’s computing resources, all of a firm’s data cannot be moved from one place to another instantaneously.

With such realities in mind, planning and executing a healthcare cloud migration requires lots of due diligence. To help your organization effectively implement its next healthcare cloud migration, we’ve prepared the following three steps to help guide your organization’s cloud migration process.

1- Determine Why Your Organization Wants To Move To The Cloud

Whenever a firm is contemplating a large-scale healthcare cloud migration, the first question to ask is why your data needs to move to the cloud. Believe it or not, in many instances a company’s on-site data storage infrastructure is sufficient and will continue to be for years to come.

2- Select The Right Cloud Service Provider Partnership

While some healthcare organizations have the in-house technical expertise required to execute a cloud migration, most will have to look towards outside partners to facilitate this highly demanding transition. When searching for the right cloud partner, consider their past experience on similar projects, which clients they have worked with in the past, and their willingness to address questions or concerns specific to your cloud migration.

3- Execute Your Company’s Plan

Assuming that your organization already has a plan in place, expecting it in concert with your cloud service provider is the real key to successful cloud migration. However, before executing your plan, it is of paramount importance to backup all of the data that will be transferred to the cloud. While they are rare, mistakes happen, and catastrophic data loss has occurred. Ensuring that your organization’s data is backed up will allow for the process to be tested and tweaked as needed, which in turn will allow for a more effective migration.

Once your organization’s healthcare cloud migration is completed successfully, it is essential to continually monitor your cloud to ensure that critical data is both readily available and highly secure. At the end of the day, cloud migration offers healthcare organizations the opportunity to offload intensive IT tasks to a third-party, which in turn allows for your team to focus on delivering the highest possible quality of care to patients.

Clear Skies Ahead: How a Multi-Cloud Strategy Can Benefit Your Business

Todd Matters, CTO, VP of Engineering at RackWare

As more organizations move to the public cloud, they face an important decision: Should they use just one cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), or should they adopt a multi-cloud strategy, one that makes use of multiple cloud providers?

There are several major cloud platform providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The advantage of a multi-cloud strategy is that organizations can reap significant benefits by using the best of different platforms, rather than relying on a single provider for all of their cloud needs.

Many companies are now realizing this advantage. According to Rightscale’s 2016 State of the Cloud Report, companies are using an average of 3.6 separate public clouds. It’s not always on purpose. In some organizations, multi-cloud happens by accident. The marketing team makes the decision to use AWS, while the HR department, operating in its own silo, decides to deploy Azure. And there you have it: a multi-cloud environment.

But for many organizations, multi-cloud is a strategic imperative and the driver for many of them is disaster mitigation. In some instances, the use of multiple clouds can minimize the risk of widespread data loss or application downtime due to a failure in a cloud-computing environment.

Such a worst-case scenario is not theoretical. Indeed, it’s almost inevitable. A recent outage of the AWS S3 storage service sent shock waves through IT departments around the world. The result is that many companies that never pursued a multi-cloud strategy are now giving it serious consideration because it could help protect their data and keep their business running in times of crisis.

“(The) S3 crash will inevitably cost businesses millions of dollars,” asserted Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers in a statement. “This is why all businesses need a multi-cloud strategy so they can adapt immediately when, inevitably, one of their cloud vendors experiences a failure.”

Another reason not to put all your eggs in one cloud is buying power. It’s never a good idea to get locked in with just one vendor. A multi-cloud approach lets you play vendors against one another to keep them honest in terms of pricing. Establishing relationships with multiple cloud providers gives you more leverage when negotiating with one particular vendor. Multi-cloud gives you a level of protection against price gouging and enables you to strike more favorable deals.

It also keeps your options open if one of your providers decides to change its Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Say one of your cloud providers decides to change its SLAs in a way that no longer aligns with your needs. If you’re operating in a multi-cloud environment, you can easily move your workloads to another provider. This works too if you’re not getting the level of support you expect.

Companies that pursue a multi-cloud strategy also benefit from a best-of-breed infrastructure. This is a real advantage because, in truth, some clouds are better at some functions than others. Microsoft Azure, for example, may be the best choice for running Windows applications. Google Cloud has a reputation for excelling where big data systems are concerned. Some clouds are known for their secure storage capabilities. Others cater to developer organizations, offering fast start times for virtual servers and low rates for small instances.

I’ve seen some companies that make the decision to use one cloud for production and another cloud for disaster recovery. For other companies, certain applications and data might be subject to very stringent regulatory requirements and thus only safe in the hands of particular cloud providers. By selecting the cloud service best suited to a specific use case, your organization can construct a cloud experience that ideally meets your needs and satisfies your unique requirements.

And then there’s the question of capacity and growth. If you’re relying on just one cloud provider to meet your capacity and growth demands, that could be risky in and of itself. Multi-cloud, on the other hand, can ensure you always have the resources you need to quickly meet the demands of your growing business.

But don’t more clouds mean more problems? Some argue that the more clouds you mix together, the more complex your environment becomes. It becomes more difficult for workloads to interoperate across heterogeneous cloud environments and could also become more risky from a security standpoint. These concerns can be mitigated, however, if your multi-cloud environment is well managed.

The good news is that there are cloud-management tools to help you monitor usage, performance and costs across a multi-cloud environment. They can also bring intelligence and automation to your multi-cloud environment, enabling your organization to easily and cost-effectively leverage multiple clouds without having to change applications or operating systems.

For many companies, multi-cloud is now providing a significant competitive advantage. The bottom line is that businesses are benefiting from better performance and greater cost efficiency by selecting a variety of cloud platforms and technologies tailored to their needs. 

Hybrid Cloud Management, Don’t Get Lost in the Cloud

Todd Matters, Cofounder and Chief Architect, RackWare

4 Hybrid Cloud Management Challenges that Organizations Must Solve

For most organizations, the move to hybrid cloud is now a question of when, not if. Fully 82% of enterprises plan to have a hybrid cloud strategy this year, according to Infoholic Research. The worldwide hybrid cloud computing market is expected to grow about 34% annually over the next five years, reaching $241.13 billion by 2022.

Companies are embracing hybrid cloud because of the many advantages it offers compared to relying on a single provider for all of their cloud needs. Hybrid offers balance and flexibility. It helps companies achieve a wide array of business goals, including availability, reliability, security and cost-efficiency.

Still, there are a number of challenges associated with hybrid cloud. Here are four management issues that companies need to address to enjoy a successful hybrid cloud implementation.

Managing complexity. More clouds can sometimes mean more problems. The more clouds you blend together, the more complex your situation becomes. Some organizations are standardizing on two or three public clouds, along with multiple private clouds and data centers. And those cloud environments have very different characteristics and very different interfaces. Customers may be able to readily monitor and manage each individual cloud environment. But supporting and managing all the diverse cloud platforms and getting them to play nice together can be a serious challenge. To bridge the gap among those environments you need a proper abstraction layer that lets you meet the specific needs of your different cloud platforms while making them simple and easy to use.

Managing costs. In many hybrid cloud environments, workloads running in the cloud are not required 24/7 but rather at particular times throughout the day or the week. The last thing you want to do is pay for cloud usage when you’re not actually using it. What’s more, the cost of a virtual machine in a private cloud may be different from the cost in a public cloud. So how do you charge for a virtual machine? How do you delete a virtual machine that’s not in use so you no longer get charged for it and then, at the appropriate time, quickly re-provision that machine when it’s needed? You must be able to automatically park and un-park your virtual machines, in any environment, at critical predetermined times to ensure adequate capacity during peak periods and cost savings during non-peak periods.

Managing compliance. Another significant challenge in a hybrid cloud environment is the managing of audit trails and compliance. Companies today spend tens of millions of dollars on compliance. They are constantly subjected to routine audits during which they need to prove they are adhering to a particular compliance rule by providing the appropriate approvals and reports. Showing compliance is especially complicated in a hybrid cloud because there are many differences across those disparate environments. Simply producing a consistent set of log messages and audit trails between OpenStack, Azure and Amazon Web Services, for instance, is no easy task. So as organizations move to hybrid cloud, automation is essential to keep track of what resources users have touched, which systems were provisioned, what tests were run, what errors were encountered, and when users logged on and off. That’s how you can ensure full operational compliance.

Managing migration. Migrating to the hybrid cloud can be a complex and labor-intensive initiative, especially when the project is in the hundreds or even thousands of workloads. Hybrid IT environments have great potential to improve and streamline IT operations. But simply having access to a cloud environment doesn’t necessarily help integrate existing applications or smooth out deployment of greenfield workloads. Realizing the benefits of hybrid cloud requires that existing applications have easy and flexible mobility into existing private and public cloud environments. Even greenfield applications require mobility among clouds and environments to be effective and economical.

The good news is that all these concerns can be mitigated if your hybrid cloud environment is well managed. There are hybrid cloud management solutions to help you monitor usage, performance and costs across your hybrid cloud environment. These solutions can also bring intelligence and automation to your hybrid cloud environment, enabling your organization to easily and cost-effectively leverage a variety of cloud platforms and technologies tailored to your needs.

RackWare’s Hybrid Cloud Management Suite