In enterprise IT, it’s troublesome to discover a bigger or extra pervasive topic than the persevering with rise of cloud computing. Most of these narratives give attention to the prevalence of hybrid cloud as the answer that many, if not most, companies choose.
But what about firms that need to contemplate, as an alternative, shifting most or all their knowledge center-based property and processes to the cloud? What drives these selections, what challenges do they face, what advantages do they hope to seize, and which trusted companions may help them obtain their objectives? A lately printed buyer use case regarding the cloud migration that Virtustream applied for Franciscan Health provides deep insights into this course of.
Franciscan Health: Profile, objectives, challenges
Headquartered in Mishawaka, Ind., Franciscan Health’s 18,000 part- and full-time staff serve sufferers at 12 hospitals and quite a few clinics in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. The firm additionally engages with docs in a whole lot of native medical practices.
Like most large-scale medical organizations, Franciscan Health has shifted from conventional record-keeping practices to EHR (digital well being information) applied sciences, and has utilized Epic EHR options for the previous decade. As a part of a longer-term technique to exit the information heart enterprise, in 2018 Franciscan Health determined emigrate its Epic system and information to a cloud setting. But because of the inherently delicate nature of sufferers’ information and the rigorous compliance laws they’re ruled by, the health-care supplier determined to look past typical public cloud platforms and companies.
Why did Franciscan Health want to have interaction a cloud supplier with deep managed companies capabilities? The firm believes the power to dump parts of its infrastructure operations and software administration will allow its IT workers to discover and implement extra revolutionary new expertise options and tasks, that, in flip, assist Franciscan Health higher assist the people and communities it serves and extra successfully adapt to speedy market adjustments and sudden occasions.
Those have been legitimate and helpful objectives, however Franciscan Health’s migration was something however easy. The IT infrastructure supporting the corporate’s Epic setting consisted of about 50 bodily servers with almost 3,000 cores that supported 400+ VMs and greater than 200TB of affected person information and different knowledge. The system served the 24/7/365 wants of some 9,000 concurrent customers, together with docs, nurses, managers and different health-care and enterprise workers.
Along with supporting hundreds of finish customers, Franciscan’s IT setting required sturdy ranges of efficiency. Epic measures its software scalability with Global References per second (GRefs), a metric that represents the variety of occasions per second that the Epic Caché operational database is referenced. In 2018, that translated into 7 million GRefs for Franciscan Health’s 25TB Caché database.
In different phrases, together with discovering a cloud supplier that would ship the degrees of efficiency, safety and assist required, Franciscan Health additionally wanted assist managing what it knew could be a extremely difficult migration.
Virtustream Healthcare Cloud
After conducting a diligent search, Franciscan Health selected Virtustream as its cloud associate. Aa a Dell Technologies enterprise, Virtustream is an enterprise-class cloud supplier whose companies are purpose-built to assist advanced IT environments and mission-critical functions like these from Epic and SAP.
Of specific curiosity to Franciscan Health was Virtustream’s Healthcare Cloud, which helps Epic’s EHR Provider and Payer options. Those choices allow health-care…
