Why is automation the key to unlocking the value and power of hybrid cloud in healthcare?

Adopting Hybrid Cloud as a Wholesale Philosophy in Healthcare

While it recognizes a similar understanding of hybrid cloud environments, the CDW extends its view of the concept, describing it as a foundational philosophy. As Chris Gibbs, manager of the hybrid infrastructure technology practice at CDW, explained, “Running a hybrid cloud effectively requires adopting patterns and practices that best suit the applications and workloads on any platform, regardless of Be that on-premises. Public cloud or across multiple clouds. In practice, this means aligning operations, organizations and processes with common frameworks and principles.”

Gibbs said CDW’s unified cloud concept “starts by transforming the way your IT organization operates in addition to automating your on- and off-premises workloads.” It is part of a digital transformation effort that leverages platform engineering to transform previously manual tasks into automated tasks and traditional infrastructure into immutable infrastructure.

“CDW Unified Cloud and Platform Engineering is completely new concepts and a new philosophy of automation and service delivery that is vendor agnostic. Your on-premises data center is now integrated with a public cloud provider as two separate and distinct environments,” Gibbs explained. “Service delivery is now either on-premises or placed in the public cloud depending on the business requirements. You have increased your flexibility, and your technical service delivery model is based on business and financial drivers versus technology.”

Read more: Learn how to improve management in complex healthcare cloud environments.

How automation can amplify the benefits of a hybrid cloud

Enterprise architect Andrew Fanning of CDW said that healthcare organizations should take advantage of automation to “bring some of the promise of the cloud back to the on-premise — and therefore hybrid — world.”

However, it is critical that healthcare IT teams understand where they are in their cloud journey and what their IT environment can support. Once an organization is further along in its implementation, it can begin deploying full-scale, cloud-based automation.

In hybrid cloud environments, Fanning said, automation can act as a translator. “So, if I need to deploy on-premises against the cloud, I can hide some of that in code behind automation, and automation makes it more easy for the end user to request services regardless of location.” Could be an easy way out.”

Fanning and Neil Graver, executive technology strategists at CDW, cited two automation tools that currently dominate the automation market — Ansible and Terraform — saying that both offer tremendous changeability and flexibility.

Fanning explained that the first step in any automation journey is leveraging your data to automate on-premises through Data Ops. I think we’ve come a long way in that first step of getting a lot of resources like infrastructure in code as code and really automating on-premises to start that foundational journey of resiliency Has gone. And we should focus a little on that.

next: Discover the basic steps for optimizing your organization’s hybrid cloud environment.