Cloud Computing in Healthcare: Hospitals’ Big Move and the Bandwidth Required

In recent years, many hospitals and healthcare organizations nationwide have been exploring how migration to the cloud could enhance their business operations. The benefits of the cloud are hard to ignore: agility, scalability, time savings, even security if implemented correctly. And although there were initial concerns about cloud computing in healthcare, cloud platforms have come so far and benefited from such an investment in recent years that many hospitals are taking a fresh look at their options. Due to drivers, such as IoT and big data analytics, the worldwide cloud computing in the healthcare market is expected to reach nearly $69.31 billion by 2032.

While digital transformation in healthcare has been gradual over the past decade, the Covid-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on healthcare IT leaders’ perspectives of the cloud. Historically, healthcare providers have been cautious about storing or processing sensitive patient data and financial information in the cloud, preferring to host data on-site and manage storage, server maintenance, and security in-house. However, the pandemic exposed the limitations of existing IT infrastructure, highlighting the need for more scalable and resilient solutions. With limited IT staff, an increased number of remote workers, and a higher demand for advanced servers and solutions to support cutting-edge patient care, healthcare facilities recognized that cloud technology could enhance operational efficiency, ensure continuity of care, and better support the evolving needs of the healthcare industry overall.

What’s more, hospital executives have more IT options than ever before, and they’re having to make critical decisions faster than they’d like. Some are choosing a hybrid cloud solution, which brings together the best of both worlds (on-premise and off-premise). On-premise solutions require upfront capital expenditures (CapEx) to deploy, ongoing maintenance costs, as well as qualified headcount to provide administration of the environment. When the need to scale arises, this model can cause delays in acquiring hardware, downtime associated with hardware migration, and additional CapEx requirements. Cloud (off-premise) solutions, on the other hand, shift much of the responsibility of all these challenges to the cloud service provider, which is a breath of fresh air for many IT decision-makers. With cloud computing in healthcare, providers move into an operating expense (OpEx), subscription-based model that provides elasticity to quickly scale up or down as needed.

There’s another critical piece to this puzzle. As cloud adoption in healthcare rises, the need for reliable, scalable bandwidth is becoming increasingly important. Healthcare providers need robust network connectivity to move large files, such as radiology images, as well as private connectivity to meet strict HIPAA compliance.

Segra is uniquely positioned to help the healthcare sector achieve its goals of leveraging both on and off-premise services with high-speed connections. Our team can custom design network connectivity that complements the healthcare provider’s IT infrastructure requirements. Segra provides customers direct, private, and scalable network access to major cloud service providers. Historically, access to cloud service providers required a connection across the public internet, which often introduced security, latency, and transmission speed concerns. Segra customers benefit from a private and custom-built network that offers end-to-end (customer premise to the cloud) Layer 2 Ethernet connectivity. Segra bypasses the public internet to provide consistent, guaranteed high-speed bandwidth and superior network performance backed by strong service level agreements to support healthcare’s latency-sensitive and mission-critical applications.

To learn more about Segra’s solutions for cloud computing in healthcare, click here. And click the link to see the entire Segra interactive fiber map.