- Benefits of Software-Defined Networking in Healthcare
- Software-Defined Networking Aids HIT Infrastructure Advancement
Ninety percent of respondents agreed that legacy network infrastructure cannot keep up with the demands of modern network infrastructure. More healthcare organizations are considering and deploying cloud-based solutions for their infrastructure and many are met with networking roadblocks that can’t be resolved without upgrading the network.
Adopting a cloud solution requires organizations to migrate data from their legacy solution. The network requirements for data migration, as well as cloud deployments, are much heavier than legacy systems can handle. Organizations often have to redo their network infrastructure to move forward with other IT projects.
Eighty-five percent of respondents stated that they are several years away from completely leveraging cloud benefits and digital transformation because of their legacy network’s limitations. The gap between realization and deployments is consistent across all verticals and is preventing organizations from fully leveraging digitized infrastructure. It can also threaten entities’ positions in their respective markets.
Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed reported that they experience cloud-related network issues caused by their legacy infrastructure at least a few times a week. Ninety-three percent of those respondents stated that it impacts their business at least monthly.
“The inability of these networks to support cloud-centric applications and workloads and just as importantly, provide end-to-end visibility into their performance is viewed as a real challenge to cloud success,” said the survey.
The report discovered that IT professionals see legacy networks as a barrier to cloud success.
“Decision makers display a very high level of understanding that meeting their technology challenges means putting infrastructure needs first,” said report authors. “As businesses are turning to a cloud-centric strategy, there is a major gap between what their current hardware-centric infrastructure offers and what they need to realize the benefits of the cloud.”
“Companies are struggling with legacy networks, which are not suited to meet the demands of today’s cloud based applications and their accompanying workloads,” report authors continued. “Simply put, legacy networks are dysfunctional for the business.”
IT decision-makers felt that updating their legacy networks to support cloud would provide greater opportunities for expansion, better agility, better efficacy in bandwidth usage, and increased productivity.
Organizations are currently trying to close the gap in the adoption rate of successful cloud deployments by making plans to adopt more advanced network infrastructure.
Ninety-eight percent predicted that SD-WAN would play a large part in the future of managing more advanced and complex networks. Wide-spread SD-WAN adoption is growing rapidly as organizations see the benefits for network management.
“Companies recognize that deploying SD-WAN ensures that a business’ wide-area network is future-proof for cloud computing and can quickly adapt to rapidly changing application and business requirements,” said the survey. “Likewise, they see SD-WAN as crucial for businesses looking to increase control of their networks, decrease infrastructure costs and add more flexibility to their business, as percent plan to adopt SD-WAN to facilitate their digital transformation initiatives in the next one to four years.”
Legacy networks no longer have a place in IT infrastructures that use cloud computing. Updating network infrastructure and building a foundation for advanced digital solutions to run on needs to be a priority for healthcare organizations using cloud.
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