Brian Bobo, CIO & CISO, Greenway Health
“When making infrastructure decisions, choose the best
balance of costs and performance. . . . Your infrastructure
must ultimately support the balance you choose.”
When making infrastructure decisions, think about who’s going to be using the application, what kind of performance you need, the amount of data you are working with, disaster recovery (if data is critical), and costs. There are advantages to putting things in the cloud, but depending on data usage,
a cloud solution comes with a cost. Choices such as serverless computing architectures, where the infrastructure automatically allocates resources, can make cost projections difficult. If you have high data demands, you may want to use a hybrid solution that puts metadata in the cloud and keeps the actual data in on-premises storage. That decision, however, introduces new operational and performance challenges.
We are currently transitioning legacy electronic health record applications to the cloud. Our applications, which run high input/output per second, were not written for the cloud, so just transferring that code to the cloud will not work. In addition, we have to be careful how we transition because even if we get the applications running smoothly in the cloud, putting all the health data there would be too costly.
When making infrastructure decisions, choose the best balance of costs and performance. There may be many good reasons to go to the cloud, but financial return may not be one of them. Your infrastructure must ultimately support the balance you choose.
