When it comes to cloud transformation, the healthcare industry isn’t as fast-moving as other industries such as retail, manufacturing, or logistics, because of tighter regulation around data privacy among other things. However, this does not mean that healthcare organisations aren’t innovating as much as other enterprises in other industries — many are just unsure how to navigate the complexity behind the cloud move.
Often, healthcare organisations overlook one very crucial aspect of any cloud transformation journey— connectivity. According to a seasoned IT expert, connectivity cannot be an afterthought for any reason.
“Connectivity is the last problem that you will encounter when you are starting to talk about overall traffic flow. Sometimes, you have a lot of engineering there, but the connectivity portion will come back and haunt you if you do not consider it from the beginning of your design,” Mike Li, Managing Director of 1CLOUDSTAR, a cloud consulting and managed services provider in Asia, said in his keynote “Advanced Connectivity: Powering Cloud Transformation in Healthcare,” as part of Healthcare Frontiers 2024 conference organised by Jicara Media.
Industry roadblocks
One of the most obvious game changers in healthcare is AI which is enabling organisations to process data faster, improve productivity, and deliver better customer service, Mike Li said. However, in order to unlock these benefits, a number of hurdles have to be eliminated first.
While not entirely unique to the industry, data sovereignty is often a challenge for healthcare organisations. Government entities such as Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech), are pushing for increased cloud adoption, yet have also set limitations on what can and cannot be migrated onto the cloud.
“Government policy changes play a very important part for enterprises’ momentum shift, but investing in cloud unlocks a number of key business drivers for healthcare,” Mike Li noted. To address this, the company provides cloud consultancy services to help enterprises design a resilient and fully-optimised cloud strategy.
“We’re helping businesses become compliant, so we enable migration from on-premises to the cloud and vice-versa, depending on the business needs and regulatory requirements,” he continued. Another top concern for healthcare organisations is cost control, whereby innovation often takes a backseat in order to save money. However, there is a way to save on cloud costs, Mike Li said.
“A lot of our customers move to cloud, and then after half a year, they find that it costs them a lot of money. Therefore, many consider moving back to on-premises. What you need to do instead is to optimise your cloud use. You have to use the cloud for a lot of different things,” he added.
Resilient by design
In healthcare, resilience is very important, especially for hospitals which operate 24×7, 365 days a year. Even a minute of downtime will paralyse multiple processes, and in the event of an outage, there should be a guarantee that the organisation can quickly recover.
“Our solution has been engineered to protect the cloud environment seamlessly. It works if you’re dealing with a single telco, or with two different telcos. We are monitoring the link, utilisation, logs, and activities, providing our customers real-time visibility. We provide end-to-end solutions, and organisations don’t have to worry about anything,” Mike Li said.
Moreover, 1CLOUDSTAR is also working with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, and Huawei, giving customers flexibility, particularly for those leveraging multi-cloud deployments. “When we come in, we do not just sell you the solution; we ask you what you want to achieve. Since we have worked with a lot of enterprises in different industries, we can always find previous challenges similar to yours, and therefore recommend several options you can take,” he added.
To further illustrate the point, Mike Li described their project with a large healthcare provider in Singapore. The organisation had a lot of its workload on AWS, and several on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
“We asked what their biggest problem was. Was it security, performance, or cost? They needed to connect multiple cloud platforms together, and remain compliant with data regulations. They had internal workloads uploaded onto the cloud, and they had projects that must not have internet access. How do you connect them then if there’s no internet access? We therefore leveraged our end-to-end solution to connect their systems and maintain compliance,” Mike Li said.
Customer success
In the end, it all boils down to simplifying the complex, and making customers’ lives easier. “Our goal is to give IT managers and decision-makers peace of mind, because when you move data, you don’t want it to be stolen, or leaked. Therefore, we provide that guarantee that we got you covered in your cloud transformation journey,” Mike Li said. The company, which started off 13 years ago in Singapore as a connectivity provider, has now evolved into a full stack cloud solutions provider. Therefore, during consultations with customers on how to go about their cloud journey, the company always emphasises the importance of connectivity— and how it is the missing piece of the puzzle that will solve inefficiencies, whether in data production, access, storage, or unlocking more use cases through AI or machine learning, Mike Li concluded.
