Notifications
Clear all
Topic starter
I see here that many of you are moving to the cloud or have already moved there. I have some questions as I have avoided it thus far but have been forced into several cloud situations which I have had good and bad experiences with. I have a feeling that some software companies will eventually be "cloud only" so setting up the appropriate infrastructure is imperative.
My Questions
1. Do you have a Service Level Agreement SLA in place for your cloud apps or do you just 'wing it' when you lose internet access? An SLA is basically an insurance policy of sorts where your Internet provider pays you for your lost revenue as a result of downtime. As you would expect they are expensive. I am really curious what you guys pay if you do have one if you feel comfortable disclosing that information
2. If you don't have a SLA in place, have you lost internet and therefore your cloud apps? If so, for how long and what do you do during that downtime?
3. What does your cloud "look like"? Do you have access to a remote desktop or just the application?
4. Do you feel that it is slow? I have heard from some Office 365 users where just opening Outlook and sending an email takes much longer than a non cloud offering.
5. How do you handle your backups? Do you have access to a useful copy of your data on demand? I ask this question because of a colleague of mine asked their cloud provider that same question because they wanted to backup their own data after the "Code Spaces" fiasco from last year. They were told that the only thing they could do is get a copy of the data in an unstructured manner with no access to what the cloud provided deemed "proprietary". They were not backing up their cloud to a local device so they were at the mercy of this cloud provider. They are transitioning to another provider for backups due to a concern about their cloud provider going out of business. They were told that they could migrate to Amazon Cloud Services if they wanted to so somehow whatever proprietary data structure was moot.
6. How do you vet your cloud provider? Do you just consider the Amazon, Microsoft Azure offering out there?
7. What does your IT staff do now? Do you still have server/network/SAN guys or was that an eliminated expense?
8. How happy are you with your cloud?
Thank you in advance for any input. I would just like to see some discussion here because I think a lot of people are just following the herd into the cloud without considering some important questions
Mike Zavolas
Tallahassee Neurological Clinic
Posted : May 8, 2015 8:48 am
Hi Mike,
I know this is a year old but it is even more relevant today 🙂
- SLA is a must. I have not personally seen an SLA that stipulates paying you actual $ for downtime (doesn't mean you can't negotiate one). The SLAs I've seen usually have terms that outline how fast they are required to restore service, answer calls, resolve issues, process change requests, etc.
- It is inevitable that someone somewhere with a backhoe will ruin your day J. Ideally you’d want diverse (as in they don’t follow the same physical path) ways to the cloud. This could mean two ISPs. Let’s say you get your EMR hosted – get a circuit dedicated just to that traffic and use your commodity internet as a backup. This is a challenge in rural areas…
- Worked for a hospital before and we migrated our on-premises EMR to the cloud. We had RDP access to the servers, trust between the domains. We did have admin access to some servers.
- Have no experience with Office 365…have heard some not very flattering things about one drive for business.
- That should also be covered in the SLA. On the same topic, you’d want to make sure that you’d be able to get your data (in a certain timeframe and format that you specify) if for some reason you decide to migrate to a different vendor or discontinue the business relationship.
- Ask for references. Trust but verify J. That goes double if you want to trust them with your EMR in which case go with a provider that specializes in healthcare. They will know the industry and will be familiar with BAAs, HIPAA audits, etc. I think in terms of generic cloud offerings Amazon has the most market share…maybe more than all other vendors combined.
- We did not see a reduction of IT staff but it would depend on what and how much you move to the cloud. You may see some attrition and some job roles might change.
- I’d do it again J. It was a lot of work on the front end and implementation can be challenging due to the inherent complexities of healthcare but having your EMR hosted in a proper datacenter with replication across other DCs is a comforting thought. J
I hope that helps somewhat.
Regards,
Ted
Posted : May 17, 2016 5:25 am
