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DRaaS, Storage Among Top Growing Health IT Cloud Adoptions

Healthcare cloud adoption is expected to continue to grow over the next few years especially in disaster recovery and storage.

By Elizabeth O'Dowd

- New market projections foresee a growth in cloud computing adoption over the next few years, especially in the areas of storage and disaster recovery. 

Cloud computing is growing in for healthcare storage and DRaaS.

First, a Research and Markets report on enterprise cloud growth across major industries including healthcare listes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft among the top cloud vendors, all of which are the most popular among healthcare organizations. The report indicates that cloud adoption is not slowing down and general cloud adoption is expected to continue through 2022.

Previous reports have identified healthcare cloud computing as necessary component of IT infrastructure in the years to come. Organizations are more likely to choose cloud technology over traditional infrastructure technology in preparation of the future cloud technology standard because of the general compatibility

The future of healthcare cloud is looking up as a recent HIMSS survey indicates that cloud is becoming the preferred choice for healthcare back-office applications, backup and disaster recovery, revenue cycle management and patient engagement. Advantages of the cloud include, cost savings, scalability, speed, freeing up internal storage, mobilizing the workforce, and improving user applications.

One of the biggest areas of cloud growth is in cloud storage solutions. Another recent Markets and Markets report predicts that the cloud storage market will grow steadily through 2021, driven by the comparatively lower cost of subscription-based payments to on premise servers as organizations produce and collect more data.  

Paying for cloud services tends to have less of a negative impact on an organization’s financial investment in IT as a result of not having to buy hardware as well as expensive installation and deployment for physical servers. With the influx of data from connected medical devices, scaling up an on-premise data center is costly and often cannot be done as quickly as scaling up a cloud solution.

“The need to maintain on-premises storage resources such as disk storage and tape devices was reduced due to the availability of cloud storage solutions,” report authors stated. “Some of the benefits provided by cloud storage solutions include scalability, flexibility, infrastructure cost, and security. The increasing demand for cloud storage solutions among organizations has further enhanced the demand for across many verticals.”

The other most prominent sect that has shown significant growth is cloud-based backup and disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS). A report by Transparency Market Research claims that the DRaaS will continue to have a high adoption rate through 2024 because of the amount of organizations that see data as their primary concern.

“In the present scenario, the world is running on the basis of data across all sectors,” report authors found. “DRaaS is primarily implemented to protect resources and data from disruption in the event of disaster. DRaaS helps in business continuity for organizations as it provides a total system backup caused by system failure.”

A couple of major elements driving the rise of DRaaS technology are the rise of virtualization and the rapid adoption of other cloud infrastructure technologies.

“As the cost of ownership of data recovery services is increasing, organizations are shifting towards virtualization and cloud,” the report authors explained. “This is due to the fact that, these technologies are safe, easy to use, cost effective, and can be managed easily.”

Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions are more flexible and scalable compared to traditional disaster recovery solutions. Traditional solutions require setting up servers and configuring them to match the host site for a smooth transition when recovery is needed. Traditional solutions can also be expensive as organizations may need to purchase both the main and recovery servers at the same time to avoid configuration incompatibility.

Healthcare organizations are deploying cloud solutions across their IT infrastructure to leverage data collected for analytics and building applications, as well as saving on-premise space and reducing the cost of hardware. The challenge for healthcare organizations is no longer whether to deploy the cloud, but how they will build a network infrastructure to support the inevitable continuation of cloud adoption

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