In a landscape in which healthcare costs are rising and healthcare organizations are increasingly hard-pressed to deliver value and convenience for patients, innovation (both technical and non-technical) can be an avenue for healthcare organizations to meet the needs of their patients/consumers. However, the need to innovate also places enormous pressures on CIOs and IT staff as they have to both address these needs, as well as ‘keep the lights on’ to deliver on daily operating requirements.

There are several key IT challenges in the context of healthcare. Moving to the cloud is a common challenge for healthcare organisations. Although cloud services provide convenience, accessibility and low operational overheads, public clouds do not always adhere to strict data governance and healthcare regulations or provide quick access to data when needed, which is something that only an on-premises solution can provide. The challenge lies in finding a good cloud solution that provides agility while providing good control over performance and security.

With the high occurrence of cybersecurity threats given the attractiveness of healthcare data, IT teams have to be extremely vigilant. They need to deal with security issues as it relates to patient privacy and data security. In order to achieve a high level of security, these considerations need to be incorporated into every step of the infrastructure lifecycle but legacy data protection and disaster recovery (DR) solutions are unable to meet the demands of the modern infrastructure.

Another challenge that healthcare IT teams face is simplifying everyday tasks in order to enhance operational efficiencies. What IT administrators need is a simple and elegant way to manage their virtual environments and streamline common workflows within a datacenter, without the use of disparate management solutions. The end goal is to achieve management and deployment simplicity with minimal disruption to workflow. 

Achieving operational efficiencies

With web-scale building blocks that eliminate silos of infrastructure, increase resource utilisation, and scale to allow future growth without wholesale replacement, the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform replaces the complexity of legacy infrastructure. The Nutanix Prism management interface provides intuitive workflows for all administrative tasks related to storage deployment, management, and scaling, with a virtual machine (VM)-centric view point. There is thus no need for highly skilled storage specialists within healthcare IT teams, resulting in savings and better operational efficiencies.

Nutanix’s on-premise enterprise cloud solution offers the best of both worlds. It delivers the benefits of public cloud offerings like AWS, including agility, rapid deployment, enterprise grade security, and performance without the risks around compliance and security associated with public clouds. Additionally, healthcare organisations can start at a level which they are comfortable with and scale up as required, resulting in better cost and IT resource management.

Healthcare IT and security teams can have a peace of mind with Nutanix’s holistic and security by design approach in both its data center and software development lifecycle. The Nutanix enterprise cloud platform provides automated features that keep strict security postures in place and integrates with a broad ecosystem of validated, security partner solutions. 

In terms of management and deployment simplicity for healthcare organisations, Nutanix offers a number of key features: self-healing systems, one-click infrastructure and virtual environment management, fast deployments and seamless upgrades.

Self-healing systems in Nutanix’s solutions and platforms help save time, add efficiency and simplify everyday tasks, thus enhancing operational efficiencies. With a single click of a button, Nutanix Prism manages the entire stack from the storage and compute infrastructure all the way up to VMs. This eliminates the need for disparate management solutions.

The simple deployment process of Nutanix’s solutions and platforms mean Healthcare IT administrators can deploy clusters for storage and virtualization and get applications running within minutes. Nutanix also greatly simplifies the firmware upgrades process, enabling IT to perform hardware updates as soon as within an hour, without any downtime.

Overall, Nutanix offers a wide range of capabilities across the stack to make sure data and VMs are continuously available, given that failures can occur anytime within the data center. Features such as data protection and data redundancy are built into the DNA of the Nutanix infrastructure, making life easier for IT administrators, thanks to its IT efficiencies and lower costs. 

For more information on Nutanix’s healthcare solutions, visit www.nutanix.com/healthcare