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Cloud networking and healthcare: The future of innovation

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Mark Daley, director, digital strategy & business development at Epsilon, explains why he feel it's urgent that companies adopt cloud technology. 

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly accelerated digital transformation on a global scale. For healthcare organisations, the sharp rise in healthcare demand has not just created a drive towards transformation, but there is now an urgency to focus on innovation.

According to a recent survey by McKinsey of more than 100 healthcare leaders, 90% agreed that the pandemic will fundamentally change the way they do business, requiring new products, services, processes, and business models. It forced many healthcare operations online and into the cloud almost overnight.

As a result, healthcare organisations are seeking a way to improve cloud and networking functions with higher operational efficiency. Compliance and data management are needed to innovate and expand the use of cloud-based applications and services, so these need to be a priority for all kinds of healthcare professionals. It’s vital that healthcare organisations keep up in a market that can change very quickly and future-proof their cloud strategy.

Progressing post-pandemic

COVID-19 created a number of new challenges for businesses including how to deal with cloud provider networking inefficiency, lost business and revenue opportunities, and changing and increasing infrastructure costs.

Healthcare organisations facing continually repeating processes such as migrations, inter-networking challenges and a lack of function consistency across clouds need to look at innovative cloud solutions to regenerate how they handle data. Continual cycles of differing delivery needs for client services in each cloud environment creates a lack of consistency, with simple networking tasks using different approaches and set up steps.

Innovating with the cloud

The cloud itself is fundamental to innovation, enabling businesses to increase efficiencies and improve productivity of engineering and operations teams – 14x build/deployment (32 hours without, 2 hours with) and 7x tactical ops (8 hours without, 1 hour with). On top of this, it also provides simplified networking and security in the cloud, hassle-free configuration and network onboarding, and the ability to overcome the skillset gap in public cloud.

And new technologies are becoming increasingly accessible for all healthcare organisations and are constantly evolving to meet changing needs and demands, sometimes caused by cloud technologies. Examples include the simplification of networking and security, with hassle-free configuration and network onboarding, and functions to overcome the skillset gap in public cloud.

And the ability to meet regulatory and compliance obligations, particularly across diverse or distributed sites including both cloud and business sites is critical.

Ultimately, these new functions are becoming available for all healthcare organisations who face the same challenges as any other business – and these functions combined with the benefits of working with the cloud aim to reduce CAPEX and OPEX whilst increasing overall performance.

A key function now available to healthcare organisations is a robust networking solution that can set up networking across multiple cloud platforms in a more familiar and consistent way. Enterprises can gain networking tools for cloud environments that are available as their own, with the following key features:

Network Transport – Dedicated path networking over a private MPLS network that you control:

Network Control – Configurable end to end set up, control and routing and policy functions for directing and protecting your traffic:

Cloud networking benefits

Cloud networking provides connectivity between applications and network resources on-demand, with added security, scalability and flexibility.

According to MarketsandMarkets, the market for healthcare cloud computing is expected to grow from $28.1 billion in 2020 to $64.7 billion by 2025. The industry’s rapid growth has been triggered by the need for healthcare providers to access patient data on-demand, and furthered by COVID-19 and stay-at-home orders. 

A comprehensive cloud networking solution can provide a whole range of benefits for all kinds of enterprises, including reduced time and effort, increased performance, improved uptime, higher efficiency, reduced skills gap issues and tighter security.

For healthcare professionals in particular, it enables them to: 

Transforming healthcare with the cloud

For healthcare organisations, it is vital that they not only adopt cloud technology, but also understand how to leverage it to accelerate transformation into the future. Complexity is only set to increase in the healthcare sector, as new innovations and developments require new regulations and security guidelines. 

Data in the healthcare sector is sensitive, and a secure cloud networking solution strengthens the protection of patient data as it moves in transit, as well as strengthening access policy to key IT software and infrastructure. 

The right cloud networking solution will seamlessly synchronise security across all elements including cloud into a common view and domain, helping healthcare professionals take their data management to the next level.

With an innovative and comprehensive cloud networking solution, healthcare enterprises can seize the digital opportunity of today and protect their customers data and information, whilst meeting the needs of patients of both today and tomorrow. 

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