How healthcare organizations can realize the 5 key advantages of multicloud by design

Note: This is the second in a three-article series on multicloud for healthcare organizations. The first piece covered the benefits of the multicloud by design adoption strategy, and the third will provide insights from a key use case.

Adoption of the multicloud by design approach places a strong emphasis on exploring why an organization wants to move to the cloud and how it stands to benefit from doing so. This means taking a step back from addressing short-term needs to better understand how the cloud aligns with an organization’s technology and business strategic priorities.

Taking a holistic approach to transitioning to the cloud helps to avoid the most common pitfalls of ad-hoc cloud adoption, which include managing workloads in multiple cloud environments and maintaining disparate – and often inconsistent – platforms and toolsets. This can lead to inefficient operations, incompatible silos of data and applications, and difficulties in creating and enforcing policies for access and security. APEX is Dell’s strategy for multicloud; it facilitates a thoughtful approach to multicloud by design by offering cloud like consumption models and solution offerings that can bridge multiple clouds, on premise, and colocation environments.

This approach offers the following five key capabilities:

1. Flexible scalability
   The cloud’s potential for scalability is well known. Healthcare organizations can use the resources they need on demand, without significant up-front costs for technology acquisition and implementation.
   While certain workloads or applications are well suited to run on the public cloud, others work best if they remain hosted on-premises or with a cloud-adjacent cloud service provider (CSP). The key is leveraging underlying operational and storage platforms that makes workloads easily transferrable from on-premises to co-located to public cloud environments and back again as business, operational, or financial needs change.

2. Transferable data controls
   As data is healthcare’s most valuable resource, organizations have long understood the benefit of using a set of common tools to store, manage, share, use, and secure their data. Often, these advantages are lost when workloads move to the cloud in piecemeal fashion. Given that each cloud provider often has different and incompatible native services, organizations may need to support dozens of tools just to keep data flowing across core applications and clouds.
   APEX, on the other hand, positions organizations to standardize on common platforms. Business applications as well as end users can interact with data the same way no matter where it resides. In addition, organizations face fewer hurdles should they choose to transition a workload to a different cloud environment, as the same data toolset will apply to its new location.

3. Advanced security
   As with data management, security is inherently less complicated when organizations can standardize on common tools. This is especially important for anything running in the public cloud – and is often the primary source of hesitation for migrating workloads there.
   Fortunately, the same security benefits baked into on-premises storage products can be utilized within public cloud environments. This lets organizations realize the resilience and cost-effectiveness benefits of running workloads in the public cloud while providing security protections compatible with their on-premises security strategy. This also enables the development of security policies that remain consistent no matter where workloads run.

4. Greater efficiency
   One advantage of on-premises storage is the ability to get the most from owned resources by using deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning technology. While these efficiencies are technically possible in the cloud – and is arguably what enabled the cloud to revolutionize computing – the end user customer is not usually obtaining the financial benefit of such technologies.
   While running APEX storage platforms in the public cloud, organizations can drive greater efficiencies from their public cloud environments. This lets organizations run workloads more efficiently and at a lower cost, providing favorable conditions for replicating a storage environment on multiple clouds and/or a co-location facility.

5. One version of the truth
   With workloads running within a common operational and data platform, healthcare organizations can create the single version of the truth that has eluded them through decades of using siloed clinical and business applications. By placing your common platforms in a cloud-adjacent location, your organization has the ability to have this common set of data accessible to all major public cloud providers without having to duplicate the data natively within each cloud.
   This presents obvious cost, maintenance, and risk management benefits: Organizations aren’t paying to store, secure, and monitor the same data sets in several places, and data is far less likely to go missing. It also drives a culture of evidence-based decision-making, as individual users and business applications alike have access to the data they need for their given role.

By leveraging a single platform and a common set of tools, policies, and technology frameworks, a solution like Dell Alliances Healthcare Cloud helps ease healthcare’s transition from on-premises, owned data centers to cloud environments. Organizations benefit from a much shorter implementation timeline, coupled with lower costs for maintenance, management, and security — all of which further support the case for a shift to multicloud by design.

In our next article, we will dive deeper into this type of cloud solution and how it can be a compelling model in which you can consume common platform cloud adjacent storage and host mission critical healthcare applications.

The past few years were a challenging time for care providers, but the resultant need for real-time information provided opportunities to innovate at an unprecedented pace. As healthcare and life sciences organizations focus on the road ahead, they must develop the agility to pivot quickly to overcome new clinical and business challenges in this data-driven environment. Working with our partner ecosystem, Dell Technologies comes alongside healthcare and life sciences organizations with a focused, deliberate approach to help them navigate the evolving patient care continuum and the current market volatility – allowing them to deliver on the promise of a healthier future. To learn more, visit Dell Healthcare online.