Data is gold. As rehashed as it sounds, data in healthcare is paramount to extend au fait medical care and largely drives preventive healthcare on the whole. Smart hospitals encourage modern technologies to collect, use, and implement patient data. They use IoT-based healthcare devices along with conventional healthcare data collected via CT scans, MRIs, X-Ray reports, and other medical test reports which accumulate huge magnitude of healthcare data.
On-Premise Data Storage
Healthcare facilities and hospitals largely prefer on-premise data storage to store and manage patient data. The primary reason for the same is pretty straightforward – they can have more control over the in-house data. Since the on-premise data centers do not need wireless connections, there’s no risk of downtimes. The idea that the healthcare providers can access the data anytime from a secure, native data center appeals to most, making on-premise data storage a popular choice, by and large.
Solving The Cloud’s Latency Problems with The Edge
Initially, many healthcare organizations looked to the cloud to solve their capacity and access challenges, but they quickly discovered that the cloud alone is insufficient, because it has serious latency problems that even the biggest pipes can’t overcome.
With cloud-based data storage, the handover process of the patient data can be smoothed, making it quick and easy without compromising on the security. Cloud storage is more scalable, pulls in less capital investment for deployment as well as maintenance. Data accessibility also improves tremendously. Healthcare organizations can start with a smaller space and eventually increase more cloud space as the amount of data grows.
Key Challenges of on-premise data storage in healthcare
Need for larger infrastructure:
As the amount of healthcare data to be stored and managed escalates, it demands more and more physical storage space. When hospitals and healthcare centers opt for on-premise data storage, they have to arrange for physical space within the premises to host the servers.
Added maintenance costs:
The on-premise data storage has evolved drastically over the last few years with Rack servers and flash-based arrays that significantly lower the maintenance costs. But the overall costs of maintaining continuous power supply, ensuring cooling mechanisms are up and operational at all times, troubleshooting server hardware and the dedicated IT resources add up considerably, making on-premise data storage a rather costly option.
Data security:
The on-premise data infrastructure is connected to the local network, and hence one could consider this as the most secure option for maintaining critical patient data. The highly sensitive data is vulnerable to phishing attacks and malware attacks. In the due process of upkeeping the security of on-premise healthcare data with reliable anti-virus software, firewalls, encryption, and multi-factor authentication, one cannot ignore the loophole brought-in by the human factor. Since the on-premise data security depends largely on the IT resources, there is always room for error.
