Making the most of cloud technology

WE live in an era of digitalisation. Mobility combined with the explosion of mobile devices and cloud technology has given individuals, organisations and entire nations a technological boost to further innovation and overall development. Businesses have recognised this. And they have been spurred to upgrade their infrastructure - from networking to storage and even compute power - in order to deal with new, unprecedented workloads and demands.

In the light of this, the move to cloud infrastructure seems almost inevitable. And yet, the rate of adoption differs widely, even within the same industry. To a large extent, this difference can be attributed to the fear of losing control over their most prized possession - their data. A global survey by the CIO magazine predicted that in three years, more than half of all IT services will be delivered via private, public and hybrid clouds. Already cloud deployments have evolved and fragmented into an era of interconnected clouds. While smaller businesses more readily utilise the benefits of public clouds, larger enterprises especially those in more "sensitive" sectors are reluctant to put mission-critical applications and data on the public cloud.

More businesses are venturing into a hybrid mix of both private and public clouds, where sensitive data is kept "in-house" while "out-sourcing" compute power from elsewhere. In the healthcare sector, the over-arching priority has always been honouring the privacy of patient data, and this has for many years relegated healthcare to the "technological backwaters". However, faced with significant pressures to lower the costs associated with providing healthcare, the industry has adopted new systems that support electronic medical records, and data sharing with other agencies.