How Security, Flexibility, and Reliability Drive Healthcare’s Colocation Migration

February 3, 2021

The healthcare sector is now looking to colocation data centers for data storage and compute. This shift reflects their choices in the need for a Tier 3 data center for a host of reasons. Security and uptime are two of the predominant concerns making them more reticent than other sectors to make the move from a total on-prem strategy. But that tide is quickly turning. Healthcare now sees that the evidence of greater flexibility, security, and reliability with colocation as part of the mix makes sound healthcare and business sense.

Every healthcare delivery organization (HDO) is seeing exponential data growth as digital transformation becomes mandatory for delivery healthcare services and the business of healthcare. The health data growth rate grew 878 percent between 2016 and 2018 alone, according to reporting on a Dell study in HIT Infrastructure magazine.

Network traffic has increased even more since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic because of telehealth and remote work. That data requires infallible access and security, both at rest and in transit. This makes connectivity and access the foundation for lowering costs and improving health outcomes while meeting changing regulatory compliance demands.

Colocation enables healthcare providers to meet growing efficiency and cost containment needs propelled by outcomes-based medicine. That means lowering data storage risk and costs along with total cost of ownership.

HDOs have traditionally felt that only on-prem data centers could provide needed data and workload security. But now the cost of maintaining, expanding, and improving those data centers has led to unsustainable Capex and the inevitable data silos that hamper healthcare innovation. The importance of data center Tier levels and hybrid cloud strategies have revealed how colocation can be a foundational element in meeting their present and future needs.

The right colocation provider can become the hub of hybrid cloud strategies (a mix of on-prem data and cloud), regulatory compliance needs, and application/workload scalability HDOs must have. This requires choosing a colocation provider capable of meeting a wide variety of diverse data protection needs via regulatory compliance and certifications. Making the right choice of collocation partner requires HDOs to understand how a Tier 3 data center supports meeting needs.

We know Colocation providers for delivering data and compute scalability that can help lower Capex costs associated with on-prem hardware, cooling, and space needs. But they also are the connectivity hub to cloud providers that enable the data access beyond the network’s edge that is vital to healthcare.

This makes understanding the impact of data center tier levels have on data security and reliability as it moves between on-prem, the colocation data center, and the cloud. This goes to the heart of the colocation center to deliver maximum uptime and disaster recovery for:

Personal health information (PHI)
Personally identifiable information (PII)
Financial Data

To improve health outcomes and lower costs, HDOs must have the means to make data secure and accessible to authorized users beyond the network. The right colocation provider is the nexus point of delivering this type of data resilience, robust network connectivity, and cloud connectivity.

Data center Tier requirements go to the heart of resiliency, redundancy, uptime and even security of a colocation facility where an HDO data is living and accessed.

Today’s healthcare is data-driven so colocation providers can deliver the support that they need by maintaining and optimizing core facility infrastructure such as power, networking, cooling, and space.

The redundancy of these systems and the ability to maintain the maximum uptime is why HDOs should seek a Tier 3 data center. To learn more about how data center tier levels impact your HDO’s ability to ensure data security, scalability, and reliability through colocation, read our Telehouse Tier Levels Guide.