Eyes on the cloud? Make sure your infrastructure and your corporate culture are prepared for the move. As healthcare organizations become tasked with improving quality of care and interoperability, appropriately managing millions of electronic health records alongside integrating social health information can make these dreams a reality. But the infrastructure lift necessary to take health IT and patient satisfaction to the next level is no easy task luckily, the cloud can provide.The cloud can offer a more efficient way to manage resources while cutting costs in the meantime. But deploying the cloud in healthcare requires careful and nuanced planning when it comes to both infrastructure and corporate culture.Tim Hanrahan, principal for Cloud Client Services at CDW, has helped dozens of organizations across the country shift their on-premises workloads to public, private and hybrid cloud models.Hes also watched as other companies have set out on cloud transformation journeys without a roadmap or a partner to guide them, often to disastrous results.If an organization doesnt take that step back to look at people, processes and technology before they implement a cloud solution, theres a good chance it will fail, Hanrahan says.Many healthcare organizations have placed simple workloads in the cloud, but some are resisting a more aggressive move. By placing more of their workloads in public, private and hybrid clouds, healthcare organizations can achieve benefits including flexibility, agility and cost savings but only if they do so strategically. The first step is to assess the organizations existing environment to set goals, identify potential stumbling blocks and determine which resources to move first.

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