Thoughts on the “cloud”

ByteandSwitch.com:” ‘Most IT executives are sold on the benefits of cloud computing, but many of their colleagues who are business decision makers still need convincing on the value of the technology, according to a survey released Monday [August 3, 2009]. A total of 28% of IT execs are planning to deploy private computing clouds by the end of 2009, according to the survey results. The most-cited benefit (41%) of private cloud computing is its perceived ability to improve efficiency. Other benefits mentioned were: “resource scalability,” cited by 18%; “cutting costs,” 17%; “experimenting with cloud computing,” 15%; and “improving IT responsiveness,” 9%. The survey, conducted by grid and cloud provider Platform Computing, detected a major stumbling block for deployment: 76% of the IT executives believe that business decision makers don’t understand the potential value of private clouds.” – One of the most difficult things to do in healthcare is to change the culture of the practitioners around you. I’ve died on many hills when “we’ve always done it that way” was the only argument against planning and implementing a new strategy. Based on current trends in interoperability, storage requirements, and limited IT labor pools, “the cloud” model will become more prevalent in healthcare. Even now, companies like Rackspace (the rackspace cloud) and Amazon (Amazon S3) are leveraging themselves against a future that includes cloud services. In addition, a recent article in InformationWeek regarding the storage of medical images makes an indirect case for cloud computing in healthcare. As storage space for medical images increases and providers demand easy access to images from any location, the idea of storing the information in the cloud becomes an attractive solution. Advantages include on demand storage, built in backup plans, outsourced support services, and decreased hardware costs; making it an ideal solution for storage hogs like CT scans, MRIs, etc.