Russell Mayne, Dell Technologies Healthcare Director for META regions, and
Michael Fredericks, Global Healthcare APEX and Multi-Cloud Lead for Dell Technologies
January 2023
There are an endless variety of terms out there for what’s going on in today’s Healthcare IT landscape. Whether Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Polycloud, Public Cloud, Omnicloud and so on; many organizations are struggling to determine the best locations for workloads to run. Multi-Cloud by design is the strategy whereby healthcare organizations can optimally run mission critical workloads in the place they should run. Let’s briefly look at a few key milestones in the world of IT.
The Private and Public Clouds
While virtualization and hypervisor technology dates significantly further back, who remembers getting their hands on mainstream x86 hypervisor technologies in the early 2000’s? Bringing hardware abstraction efficiencies to the masses redefined how we bought and consumed technology. The subsequent advancements, in these technologies, allowed us to migrate workloads with zero downtime, virtualize networking, virtualize storage, and essentially provided built-in orchestration, lifecycle management, data protection, and disaster recovery abilities; creating what we now generally refer to as a Private Cloud.
Within a few short years of hypervisor technology becoming mainstream, we saw the rise of public cloud providers who realized these technologies provided the financial and technological economies of scale for offering services to the masses. Platform-as-a-service/databases-as-a-service/everything-as-a-service, advanced analytics, ready built artificial intelligence offerings, and “serverless computing” are just a tiny drop of what Public Cloud can offer customers.
Going “All-in”
Conversations with our healthcare customers often revolved around how they had identified a particular public cloud provider, were “all in”, and were “getting out of the datacenter business.” I mean, it made sense at a high level; the value of clinical space in healthcare, the presumed costs of maintaining your own footprint, and the desire to focus your staff on other tasks were good reasons to consider “the cloud.” While this was the common “guiding light statement” back then, few fully completed that journey. Why? Because it is hard and more costly than anticipated. Unexpected fees, lengthy migrations, application dependencies, and the laws of the land/physics/economics have not always been favorable.
Multi-cloud by Design
Let’s fast forward to today. Many cloud providers have strived to develop services that differentiate them from the others to capture your mindshare and business. Is the one you would have chosen years ago still the best today? What about data residency, ethics, and privacy concerns? I regard Healthcare data as nationally sovereign. It also needs to be strategically protected against macro geopolitical shifts. If we consider cloud to be an “operating model” then almost all organizations are “multi-cloud” at this point regardless of their specific mix of private, hybrid, public, and so on.
What we all want:
- “I want to use the best services from each provider and cannot have lock-in”
- “I need each of my various applications to run in the best place for them from a technology, compliance, and financial standpoint”
- “Opex” or “Capex” works best for my organization (yes, many still want Capex)
- “I want to retain full sovereignty of my data”
- “I want my data available to (but not necessarily in) all major public clouds so I can benefit from a wide range of advanced services without paying to move data in and out”
- And yes, “I want to be out of the datacenter business” is still a common theme.
The key for success in multi-cloud can be defined as “multi-cloud by design”. Multi-cloud by design is a strategic step your organization can take to thoughtfully plan which mix of operational, financial, and technological “knobs and dials” you can turn to propel your organization into the future.
A Multi-cloud by design strategy allows your healthcare organisation to leverage all the benefits of Cloud without the constraints of going “All-in” with one provider. It allows us to see a world where sovereign healthcare data is liquid across the ecosystem with full control of data residency. Multi-cloud by design gives healthcare providers the ability to maximize this data in whatever cloud environment works for your organisation. It is a prescription for operational excellence.