“There’s been an IT explosion,” says Dan Draper, industry marketing manager, Liebert Products, Emerson Network Power. “New medical devices are now Web connected. There’s a big move toward electronic medical records, along with digital imaging, VoIP and wireless technology. These technologies bring the data directly to the doctor and the patient.”
The problem is infrastructure. “The impact throughout the hospital environment creates a strain on the infrastructure inside the data center and the hospital. It affects availability,” says Draper.
Understanding is lacking, and more familiarity with infrastructure approaches and technologies is needed, according to Jeff Sturgeon, vice president of marketing and solutions, Emerson Network Power's Liebert products business in North America.
Despite an increased reliance on IT, there is a need for more awareness of infrastructure strategies. Thirty-two percent of those surveyed had experienced unplanned downtime of their IT systems. Sixty percent indicated they plan to add more server and storage capacity in their hospital data centers in the next 24 months, while more than half are planning to update or expand IT infrastructure within an existing hospital.
Forty-nine percent of respondents mentioned a concern with security and cloud computing. Web servers and Web-based applications have the second highest cloud adoption rate at 49 percent, and 50 percent of respondents plan to implement disaster recovery/backup as a service on an internal or external cloud.
The survey responses came from North America-based professionals in IT management/IT operations, data center management and facilities management.
Valerie Valentine is senior editor for Information Management. You can follow her on Twitter at @va1va1entine or via email at valerie.valentine@sourcemedia.com.
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