When it comes to the management of rapidly expanding volumes of clinical data, hybrid cloud solutions, which combine public and private cloud environments, are uniquely suited to help. Hybrid cloud solutions can reduce an organization’s data center footprint, consolidate data silos, and provide backup and disaster recovery solutions.

Scott Raymond, NetApp’s CIO for global healthcare, says that when deploying a hybrid cloud solution, the first thing to determine is which data management platform it will run on — for example, NetApp’s ONTAP platform.

“In a hybrid solution, I can manage the data in the cloud the same way I do in my data center, and I can literally drag and drop workloads and move them seamlessly across the cloud through a private cloud and back on-premises,” he explains.

If an organization has multiple management systems, that makes copying data, doing recovery or pulling data back from the cloud more difficult because multiple tools are being used.

“If it’s all on one platform, it’s just easier to manage,” he says. “Until now, we didn’t really have a destination for those clinical workloads in the cloud.”

DISCOVER: How NetApp simplifies the cloud and delivers the right patient data securely.