Cloud Computing in Healthcare: Hospitals’ Big Move & the Bandwidth Required

In recent years, many hospitals and healthcare organizations nationwide have been researching how migration to the cloud could enhance their business operations. The benefits of the cloud are hard to ignore: agility, scalability, time savings, even security if implemented correctly. And although there were initial concerns about cloud computing in healthcare, cloud platforms have come so far and benefited from such an investment in recent years that many hospitals are taking a fresh look at their options. Due to drivers such as IoT and big data analytics, the worldwide cloud computing in the healthcare market is expected to reach nearly $52 billion by 2024.

This year has accelerated that move even further – and faster than expected. Many hospitals and healthcare providers have fast-tracked their cloud journeys to keep up with demand and serve patients remotely throughout the pandemic. Stories emerged of creative cloud-based healthcare solutions, such as HCA Healthcare’s COVID-19 data portal, which aggregates hospital metrics around patient visits, ICU beds, and more.

Hospital executives have more IT options than ever before, and they’re having to make critical decisions faster than they’d like. Some are choosing a hybrid cloud solution, which brings together the best of both worlds (on-premise and off-premise). On-premise solutions require upfront capital expenditures (CapEx) to deploy, ongoing maintenance costs, as well as qualified headcount to provide administration of the environment. When the need to scale arises, this model can cause delays in acquiring hardware, downtime associated with hardware migration, and additional CapEx requirements. Cloud (off-premise) solutions, on the other hand, shift much of the responsibility of all these challenges to the cloud service provider, which is a breath of fresh air for many IT decision-makers. With cloud computing in healthcare, providers move into an operating expense (OpEx), subscription-based model that provides elasticity to quickly scale up or down as needed.

There’s another critical piece to this puzzle: as cloud adoption in healthcare rises, the need for reliable, scalable bandwidth is becoming increasingly important. Healthcare providers need robust network connectivity to move large files such as radiology images, as well as private connectivity to meet strict HIPAA compliance.

UPN is uniquely positioned to help the healthcare sector achieve its goals of leveraging both on and off-premise services with high-speed connections. Our team can custom design network connectivity that complements the healthcare provider’s IT infrastructure requirements. UPN provides customers direct, private, and scalable network access to major cloud service providers. Historically, access to cloud service providers required a connection across the public internet, which often introduced security, latency, and transmission speed concerns. UPN customers benefit from a private and custom-built network that offers end-to-end (customer premise to the cloud) Layer 2 Ethernet connectivity. UPN bypasses the public internet to provide consistent, guaranteed high-speed bandwidth and superior network performance backed by strong service level agreements to support healthcare’s latency-sensitive and critical applications.

To learn more about UPN’s solutions for cloud computing in healthcare, click here. And click the link to see the entire UPN interactive fiber map.