Healthcare must update legacy IT infrastructure to thrive in a digital-first future. Read this article to learn how HPE solutions like HPE SimpliVity, powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors, can help to:
- Boost efficiency and scalability
- Increase security
- Gain financial flexibility
Content Summary
The Tipping Point: Why Healthcare Can’t Cling to the Old Ways of Doing IT
Relentless Security for a Relentless Threat Environment
Immutable Storage and Backup for Unending Floods of Data
An As-a-Service Approach to Healthcare Technology Investments
Build Intelligent, Scalable Healthcare With HPE From PDS
As healthcare professionals and organizations have wrestled with the global pandemic, staff shortages, and the explosion of telemedicine, a more insidious problem has grown in the background: healthcare IT’s struggle to keep up using legacy infrastructure. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has provided high performing, flexible, secure technologies to the healthcare industry for decades and offers a trifecta of tools to drive success in the digital age. This White Paper explores how HPE SimpliVity, HPE Cloud Volumes Backup, and the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform all offer healthcare IT ways to modernize infrastructure, build in data protection, and gain financial flexibility
The Tipping Point: Why Healthcare Can’t Cling to the Old Ways of Doing IT
Healthcare institutions’ pressing need to modernize infrastructure and technology did not start with the 2020 emergence of COVID-19. Yes, the pandemic put a spotlight on telemedicine, and it stretched overburdened healthcare providers who had limited resources and outdated technology. But healthcare organizations were already grappling with how to address the fast-growing aging population, rises in obesity and diabetes, and evolving patient needs.
And it isn’t just doctors and frontline healthcare workers that have felt the sting of insufficient technology tools. IT has struggled to support their healthcare organizations’ daily needs using infrastructure that simply can’t keep up.
Legacy IT systems and infrastructure are difficult to manage, maintain, and scale as healthcare organizations onboard more cloud services and embrace advanced technologies. The way IT has always been done is no longer sufficient to support the flexible needs of today’s hospitals. In addition, concerns around Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance mount for healthcare IT as those regulations grow in stringency partially because electronic patient records increase in usage.
HPE has been providing technology to the global healthcare industry for more than 50 years, and it has expedited innovation over the last few to remediate the stresses of the healthcare IT world. HPE SimpliVity, HPE Cloud Volumes Backup, and the HPE GreenLake platform have emerged as the collective answer to healthcare IT’s need for data protection, the simplicity of the cloud, and financial flexibility.
Relentless Security for a Relentless Threat Environment
2021 recorded a rate of almost two healthcare data breaches per day, according to the HIPAA Journal. While ransomware attacks reduced in volume somewhat in 2021 compared to 2022, they are still at record historical highs, have become even more sophisticated, and continue to represent a major threat to the healthcare industry.
Why the high risk? Healthcare organizations running legacy infrastructure are particularly exposed to breaches because of their outdated systems. Technology that has gone End of Life or End of Maintenance by the manufacturer poses a significant security risk. With no manufacturer accountable for these older parts, their gaps go unpatched and IT has no proactive way to prevent malicious infiltration.
Additionally, healthcare organizations have an obligation to the HIPAA Security Rule that requires them to “reasonably and appropriately” secure the electronic protected health information they generate and process. Legacy infrastructure often violates this rule, leaving healthcare organizations at risk for penalization — and IT to blame.
Healthcare organizations have options here, some of which include upgrading to supported versions of their older tech, negotiating extended support contracts, or migrating to new solutions altogether. But true data protection can only come in the form of replacing legacy infrastructure with an intelligent, hyperconverged platform.
HPE SimpliVity offers a way for healthcare companies to introduce efficiency, scalability, and availability into their infrastructure — all with complete and automated data protection for the edge. SimpliVity is a hyperconverged infrastructure that packs networking, storage, compute, and other data services into its stack. And it simplifies IT infrastructure while supporting high performance.
By taking dozens of siloed IT components and combining them into one platform, IT is better able to manage its infrastructure while knowing it has built-in data protection and validated security.
If a breach occurs, HPE offers immutable recovery for data security incidents by combining HPE SimpliVity with HPE Cloud Volumes Backup.
A Real-Life Example of HPE SimpliVity in Healthcare
St. John’s Riverside Hospital needed a technology refresh, data protection, and data center consolidation in order to ensure mission-critical applications stay online and secure.
HPE SimpliVity keeps St. John’s essential applications running quickly and securely while integrated data protection guarantees the hospital can rapidly recover normal activity should there be a system crash.
Immutable Storage and Backup for Unending Floods of Data
Healthcare has many unique challenges, but where it’s similar to nearly every other industry is in its struggle to manage its daily influx of data. As telemedicine grows in popularity — alongside the wearables market, inspiring patients to track symptoms and metrics from multiple devices and locations — healthcare IT is flooded with more data than it can store.
Eventually, physical infrastructure hits its limits, and when it does, your data is no longer secure. This is where the power of the cloud comes in. HPE Cloud Volumes Backup offers a way for healthcare organizations to get off-site, cloud-based copies of their data in an immutable data store. By bringing data off-site and out of the local cluster, IT gets simplified data management capabilities that help streamline workflows and ensure better security. You can back up to the cloud from an HPE or non-HPE storage array, and you can do so in minutes with just a few clicks.
HPE Cloud Volumes Backup ties back into the data protection challenge. Combining HPE SimpliVity with HPE Cloud Volumes Backup enables healthcare IT to back up data to the public cloud with ease. With no additional software or appliances needed, IT can set up automated backup policies that remove the burden of configuring and managing any infrastructure. By unifying data in the cloud, the solution breaks down data silos and eliminates fragmentation.
Best of all, the organization can optimize its costs by leveraging consumption-based pricing.
With HPE Cloud Volumes Backup, healthcare organizations enjoy multiple benefits associated with the cloud — from disaster recovery to scalability to simplicity. But with the third component of HPE’s technology triad, healthcare IT can fully break free of its legacy shackles to drive innovation and a better patient experience.
An HPE Cloud Differentiator
Unlike other cloud and networking providers, HPE does not charge a fee for pulling data out of its cloud solution. There are no egress charges with HPE, which brings even more flexibility to your environment.
An As-a-Service Approach to Healthcare Technology Investments
Ramping up technology to better protect healthcare data and support disaster recovery efforts is a must for any healthcare organization that aims to evolve in today’s digital world. But making those technology investments is easier said than done. Many factors go into healthcare’s lethargic pace of investment when it comes to advanced technology, including reluctance to forgo historical expenditures on legacy systems, the lack of IT talent to manage new solutions, and the instability of healthcare costs across economies.
Health expenditures are expected to outpace gross domestic product (GDP) growth over the next 15 years — according to The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development—averaging 10.2% of GDP by 2030.2 Medical costs continue to increase, throwing into question the financial sustainability of healthcare practices in certain economies. These uncertainties are enough to make any decision-maker question a pending commitment to paying out for advanced technologies — no matter how promising their benefits.
This is where the as-a-service model of HPE GreenLake offers an alternative. The HPE GreenLake platform provides a different approach to paying for the flexibility, agility, and high performance of modern infrastructure. Healthcare institutions can access infrastructure as a service for various workloads in an on-premises, fully managed, pay-per-use model. HPE GreenLake brings a cloud experience to your organization no matter where you are in your technology journey, and it’s entirely managed for you by HPE experts — freeing your IT staff for higher-value work.
For healthcare institutions that struggle to plan for new technology but know their existing IT infrastructure is holding them back, the HPE GreenLake platform provides a way to accommodate growth. Using the as-a-service model, organizations can access IT components such as storage on an as-needed basis instead of inefficiently purchasing more on-premises solutions when their organizations become overloaded. Healthcare IT can also use the HPE GreenLake platform to see resource consumption, compliance, cost, and system performance across their entire infrastructure.
A Real-Life Example of HPE GreenLake in Healthcare
The Mohawk Valley Hospital System needed to consolidate four electronic medical record systems and two hospitals into one system, and they had one year to do it.
HPE GreenLake bundled licensing, customization, and support — delivering 100% uptime and a predictable cost model.
Build Intelligent, Scalable Healthcare with HPE From PDS
PDS, A Converge Company, is an expert in healthcare related technologies and helping healthcare IT better support growth goals. Almost half of our business is in healthcare.
We have decades of experience walking healthcare organizations through digital transformation — setting them up to efficiently scale, better manage costs, and protect data from evolving threats.
We invest time and energy into understanding your existing technologies and their impact on your current environments. We show up ready to solve problems, and we understand the unique challenges healthcare organizations face. From compliance to security to cost optimization, PDS has seen it before and helped organizations like yours adopt right-fit technologies to make IT more efficient and improve the patient experience.
