The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly accelerated digital transformation on a global scale. For healthcare organisations, it caused a dramatic change and an urgency to focus on innovation efforts, with cloud networking considered.
According to a recent survey by McKinsey of more than 100 healthcare leaders, 90% agreed that the pandemic fundamentally changed the way they do business, requiring new products, services, processes, and business models.
There are a number of challenges related to networking and security created by the adoption of both single and hybrid cloud architectures. Healthcare enterprises must choose a cloud partner that will work with them to overcome the challenges and support them to be successful in the cloud with whatever model they choose.
Transforming Healthcare with the Cloud Post-Pandemic
Many healthcare enterprises are seeking a way to improve cloud management and networking functions with higher operational efficiency. Compliance and data management are needed to innovate and expand the use of cloud-based applications and services, so these need to be a priority for all kinds of healthcare professionals.
Data in the healthcare sector is sensitive, and a secure cloud networking solution strengthens the protection of patient data as it moves in transit, as well as strengthening access policy to key IT software and infrastructure.
On top of this, healthcare enterprises can ensure more efficient management of the IT component and gain a common visibility capability for management and control. They can troubleshoot problems faster, reduce the potential for mistakes and errors to create data security and compliancy holes, and ensure the auditability of key network elements.
The right cloud networking solution will seamlessly synchronise security across all elements including cloud into a common view and domain, helping healthcare professionals take their data management to the next level. It’s vital that healthcare organisations keep up in a changing market and future-proof their cloud strategy.
The Barriers to Success
Some of the few key challenges faced by healthcare organisation is network and security complexity, in terms of single or multi-cloud, connecting to the cloud, and having consistency across clouds. Another key problem faced by enterprises is observability and troubleshooting, including total non-existence from cloud providers, multi-cloud visibility and flying blind. These issues are only amplified by skill gaps, lack of automation, different native constructs and clouds that are application-focused.
Healthcare enterprises face a unique set of challenges on top of the overarching challenges of the cloud:
- Transport – When your data is in motion, it must be protected, whether it’s the transfer mechanism, encryption in motion or simply access to the data whilst in transit.
- Auditable – All facets of data protection must be auditable, including the network, its access and its transport data.
- Encryption – All data must be encrypted whether at rest or in motion.
- Availability & Processing – Systems and data should be available at all times, and flexible enough to deal with incidents quickly and efficiently.
- Security – The defense of the data, systems, infrastructure and network must be defended with up-to-date security technologies and processes.
- Access – Only those permitted to access certain types of data, system and/or infrastructure should be able to, and access should be easily maintainable.
Network Healthcare Innovation
Learn how you can create a foundation for securing user data and workloads across the Cloud
Choosing the Right Partner
Cloud service providers (CSP) do not deliver enterprise-class networking and security. Enterprises of all kinds need more than basic networking and security, whilst a lack of common standards across clouds causes cost, time and resource issues.
IT and network teams are faced with more complexity when managing applications and workloads in the cloud, yet CSPs do not overcome these challenges or meet the needs of their enterprise customers. Healthcare organisations need to find a simple yet powerful cloud model to enhance operations, comply with regulations and keep up in a changing market with new innovation.
A good enterprise-class cloud networking partner should make it simple to set up, automate, and support application environments, data stores, and other business infrastructure requirements across clouds including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and more, with access to advanced networking and security tools that enterprises expect.
Innovating with the Cloud
More and more mew technologies are becoming increasingly accessible for all healthcare organisations and are constantly evolving to meet changing demands in the industry. The cloud is fundamental to this innovation as it enables you to increase efficiency by reducing CAPEX and OPEX, resulting in:
- Improved productivity of engineering and operations teams
- Simplified networking and security in the cloud
- Hassle-free configuration and network onboarding
- Overcome skillset gap in public cloud
A robust solution can set up networking across multiple cloud platforms in a much more familiar and consistent way. Epsilon provides networking tools for cloud environments that are available as your own, with the following key features:
Network Transport – Dedicated path networking over a private MPLS network that you control:
- Fully configurable via software-defined networking (SDN) and Network as a Service (NaaS) model
- Visible performance metrics
- Clouds, data centres and internet exchanges
Network Control – Configurable end to end set up, control and routing and policy functions for directing and protecting your traffic:
- Fully configurable portal(s)
- Across public and private networks
- Visible and configurable performance metrics and policies
Complexity is only set to increase in the healthcare sector, as new technologies and developments require new regulations and security guidelines. With an innovative and comprehensive cloud networking solution, healthcare enterprises can seize the digital opportunity of today, to meet the needs of patients tomorrow.
Looking to the Future
For healthcare organisations, it is vital that they not only adopt cloud technology, but also understand how to leverage it to accelerate transformation into the future.
As such, Epsilon’s Cloud Networking service presents a fully managed end-to-end multi-cloud network that incorporates on-prem and VPN user deployments with private network transport and a BYO security capability. It allows you to directly control native cloud networking constructs to maintain cloud simplicity, with the automation, operational visibility and control needed for today’s cloud-orientated IT environment.
Organisations should be able to take advantage of IT efficiencies to save costs and respond to business opportunities and emergencies much more quickly and easily, with the confidence that its cloud partner will enable this.
Providers that offer an end-to-end cloud service across single and multi-cloud services with automation, operational visibility and control, can fulfil what enterprises need to expand their cloud capabilities.
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