Healthcare: Cost-Effective Meets Compliant

More than 25% of healthcare services organizations surveyed say that cost is still the primary factor in determining the location of workloads, and that organizations will often choose the cheapest option in the desired location. Cost is followed closely by datacenter resiliency (20%), security (15%) and compliance (15%). As regulations around ePHI tighten in the US, and as more governments globally implement data security and sovereignty regulations around citizens’ private data, healthcare organizations are forced to spend more time on data management while still providing low-latency, cost-effective access to data.

While cloud services can offer some level of geographic proximity to end users and aid in reduced latency in some cases, cloud is not always the most cost-effective option, and cloud service providers have experienced lengthy outages impacting up to thousands of customers at a time. Consistent access to patient data at all times is a necessity for healthcare providers, as are short recovery periods when an outage does occur. Additionally, healthcare services organizations note that their own customers require sub-millisecond access to critical operations and data, determining the geographical proximity for providers. Colocation facilities are typically better equipped to handle the diverse requirements, allowing service providers to choose specific locations, redundancy levels and competitive price points with the security and compliance assurances necessary to protect sensitive data.