Michigan Medicine is joining other leading healthcare organizations in expanding its use of cloud for right-sizing compute and storage capacity on-demand .
This improved agility delivers cost efficiency , with the added benefit of enhanced cyber resiliency .
Finding the right technology partner is step one .
MM chose NetApp .
Managing 2.6 million patient visits every year requires not just innovative healthcare delivery . It requires an equally innovative technology strategy . At Michigan Medicine , that took the form of an IT modernization vision to drive transition to the cloud – and maintain steady-state operations thereafter .
The goal : improve operational efficiencies and agility , while strengthening data assurance and resiliency .
The partner ? NetApp .
Tim Calahan , Michigan Medicine CTO , explains , “ There are a variety of reasons hosting EHR in the cloud makes great sense to a healthcare organization . Cloud can deliver business agility or ‘ speed ,’ and the ability to scale and right-size the environment . We plan to move our Epic environment to the cloud , as well as our imaging application and the rest of our general purpose workloads .
“ NetApp has a very strong public cloud strategy and portfolio , and provides enterprise storage product offerings in all of the major public clouds – which we ’ ll leverage for DR and Epic . This will require an enterprise storage platform with the ability to move data from on-premise environments to the cloud . NetApp provides a single , consistent management plane for all storage assets , across both on-prem and cloud .
“ Through those migrations , we will have made significant progress in moving out of the data center business … and yielding the resulting cost efficiencies ,” he says .
The MM plan also addresses the pressing issue of cyber resiliency , improving on the traditional backup and recovery processes in use today . “ Our ability to provide a much more streamlined and efficient recovery method will improve resiliency . By injecting backup and recovery capabilities into the very foundation of our cloud operating platforms , we will expand our capability for identifying and recovering from a cyber event ,” Calahan concludes .
He advises , “ Proper planning is essential . A complete technology inventory can provide invaluable insights into how to best structure a move to cloud . Have well-defined technology requirements and choose your partner wisely . Technology matters .” healthcare-digital . com 59