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By Julie Pike | February 26, 2020

Many industries are becoming more data-driven. The healthcare industry in particular is reaping the benefits of leveraging data to improve healthcare services. In fact, the entire healthcare industry has sprung up around the desire to find innovative ways to manage and leverage large volumes of data. However, questions remain: how do healthcare companies manage all of the information they are generating? How do they ensure that it is readily available to their customers? In this article, we will discuss how many industry players are evaluating a hybrid cloud strategy to accommodate their evolving needs.

The Innovative Possibilities of the Healthcare Industry

There are a number of trends happening right now that are severely affecting the healthcare industry. The aging Baby Boomer population, coupled with the rise of diseases triggered by the modern lifestyle, are increasing the demands for higher quality healthcare. Meanwhile, healthcare providers are increasingly pressured to maintain costs. The clash of these two forces of improved care for lower costs is causing the industry to look away from traditional practices and explore other options.

This has led to a new technology industry focused exclusively on leveraging smart, connected devices and data analytics in healthcare. These HealthTech organizations are improving healthcare for patients and providers by enabling data-driven decisions and improving automation of manual tasks. Some examples of the work that HealthTech players have undertaken include:

• Precision Medicine– Leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and genomic sequencing, HealthTech start-ups are able to personalize medical treatments for cancer patients. With treatments specialized on the needs of each patient’s diagnosis, doctors can help patients dramatically improve their chance of survival.
• Telemedicine– Through smart, connected devices, doctors can monitor a patient’s condition and give real-time support… all without setting up an appointment. Remote monitoring allows doctors to get the inside scoop on how patients are really doing – something they don’t typically get with regularly booked appointments.
• Administration— HealthTech companies are creating apps that make it easier to schedule appointments, file medical claims, and retrieve medical records. By minimizing the burden of administrative tasks, providers can return their primary focus to patient care.

What Do We Do with All That Data?

With this increased dependence on data comes an increased need for better infrastructure. HealthTech organizations need to ensure that providers and patients can quickly access and leverage the information that they need. In the healthcare industry, any delay can be a matter of life and death (not many other industries can say that and mean it literally).

To help manage all of this date, healthcare and HealthTech vendors are increasingly adopting the public cloud. Public cloud offers flexibility and agility that isn’t available through on-prem solutions. However, become some companies may have reservations about moving mission-critical data to the cloud, a fair number of them are adopting a hybrid cloud strategy. In fact, a survey last year determined that hybrid cloud deployment by healthcare providers would jump from 19% to 37% by 2021. Going into the new decade, having the flexibility to move and manage your data on whichever platform you choose will become more important than ever.

Overcoming the Roadblocks of Hybrid Cloud

Despite the obvious growing interest in adopting a hybrid cloud strategy, there are major roadblocks to adoption. Public cloud vendors require companies to refactor and reconfigure their applications to meet the requirements of that specific vendor. This essentially locks enterprises in and makes it even more difficult to move data away from one cloud vendor to another or back to on-premises.

Data plane virtualization is a unique platform that decouples data from underlying infrastructure to provide native mobility between private and public clouds. This enables an on-demand ability to move mission-critical data, as needed, without lengthy and risky rearchitecting of the application stack