Arnot Health

Christine Personius

First, let’s level set on a few key terms outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to ensure a shared understanding.

What are the characteristics of a cloud platform?

• The ability to access resources instantly without requiring vendor interaction.

• All services are delivered to end-users via the network.

• Shared multi-tenant resource pooling.

• Rapid scalability and contraction of deployment capabilities

• Monitoring and metering of usage for resource and cost management

There are three primary cloud service models.

1. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is managed by a vendor.

2. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), where your IT department configures the cloud application using vendor tools.

3. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS, with complete management of the cloud application by your IT department. (OS, application, storage, monitoring, etc.)

Understanding cloud delivery models is key to developing an effective organizational strategy:

• Public cloud offered by public cloud service providers includes both computing and storage, environment, and application management. The public cloud also uses a shared multi-tenant environment. As an organization, you pay ‘rent’ for using the ‘furnished’ cloud environment. This delivery model allows for rapid scalability.

"Migrating technology to the cloud should be value-driven and not focused on migrating to the cloud just for the sake of migrating to the cloud."

• Private cloud is offered by public cloud service providers as well; however, it's solely stood up and hosted by your IT department, which owns the dedicated infrastructure.

• A hybrid cloud allows you to combine different computing environments for enhanced flexibility and data sharing. This environment also presents unique challenges with management and security.

• A community cloud is an environment provisioned for specific groups or multiple organizations to allow them to work together on a shared platform. This cloud environment is more expensive to set up and maintain. However, it is generally more secure, and each member is allocated a fixed amount of storage and bandwidth.

As with any major organizational endeavor, crafting a cloud strategy involves creating a governance structure and understanding where you are in your cloud journey and where you’d like to be. Below are the vision, mission statement, guiding principles, and objectives my team and I have outlined to assist us in developing our roadmap of where we aspire to be:

Vision: Embrace a cloud-first approach to drive business value by enabling faster development, greater cost-effectiveness, and easier integration.

Mission: Empower end-users with fast, easy access to tools and resources, as well as novel solutions that are easy to use and help speed up their ability to deliver patient value and innovate. We will continuously provide computing, reliable connectivity, and capacity to empower our end-users.

Guiding Principles:

1. Maintain effective utility governance that includes management visibility, security defense strategies, and cost management.

2. Migrate to the cloud when value can be achieved.

3. Design for automation, scalability, manageability, and visibility.

4. Establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) with centralized enablement.

5. Modernization of security and architecture.

6. Enable innovation and experimentation.

Objectives:

• Enhanced cost-effectiveness and transparency of IT spending.

• Higher resilience, scalability, and availability of IT resources.

• Establish organization-wide standards for data management, security, compliance, reliability, and integration.

Achieving these objectives requires effective governance, organizational collaboration, support, and direction, as well as appropriate technology decisions. (This is not just another IT project!!)The existing technology pain points in our environment hinder our ability to move quickly due to necessary upgrades in our technology stack and data centers. However, we are making progress!! Funding remains the biggest challenge in moving the needle forward towards a cloud-first strategy.

When developing your cloud vision, plan to provide training and learning opportunities for your team and a playground environment to allow innovation to occur while laying the foundation. This will allow a greater understanding of the technology as well as the development of necessary policies and procedures to meet the objectives.

Migrating technology to the cloud should be value-driven and not focused on migrating to the cloud just for the sake of migrating to the cloud. Cloud migration of applications or services should only be considered if there is value in doing so. If value can be achieved, determining the best model for the project and the most suitable delivery approach will help you get started on the right path.