A spectrum of healthcare benefits
In terms of its impact on our lives, perhaps no industry benefits more from the information revolution than healthcare.
To achieve the outcomes we want, healthcare leverages 21st century information technology: Big data analytics, mobile and social platforms, unstructured data from thousands of clinical sensors, cognitive solutions such as those provided by IBM Watson and more. When data storage is the focus, reduction of costs is always top priority. But beyond cost, storage solutions for healthcare—as with many other industry sectors—need enhanced storage speed and efficiency while migration to the ever-growing list of new application workloads is simplified.
Software-defined storage and healthcare
Software-defined storage (SDS) offers a spectrum of new tools for achieving the goals healthcare companies have set for their IT. Essentially, SDS delivers storage services and functionality as software, unhooking the direct connection between applications and storage hardware. This brings a number of benefits. Less expensive hardware can be used, if it provides the required performance, or you can leverage what you already own–which often provides a very big advantage. Storage virtualization has become a powerful SDS tool, enabling the same set of services to be extended across entire landscapes of heterogeneous storage systems.
But healthcare is especially sensitive to risk. Perhaps no other industry receives such public scrutiny, deals with so much personal information, operates on such tight budgets and so dramatically and directly affects our lives. Throwing brand-new, unproven technologies into the mix can be a very bad idea. And this is where the market-leading IBM Spectrum Storage family of software-defined storage solutions offers such a distinct advantage. IBM Spectrum Storage is the current expression of a long history of innovation and proven deployments in the most challenging of environments.
With over 8,000 employees dedicated to healthcare, including more than 60 medical doctors and 350 healthcare professionals, IBM has completed thousands of successful healthcare transformation initiatives ranging from small hospitals to national healthcare projects. IBM holds more than 600 patents in the life sciences, healthcare and medical device fields.
Data access anytime, anywhere
Beyond lowering risk, the SDS capabilities of IBM Spectrum Storage can offer many other benefits to the healthcare industry. Think of the challenges in healthcare related to the wild growth of medical images, documents, and clinical sensor telemetry–all of which are types of unstructured data. Object storage, hybrid cloud architectures and tape systems can all play powerful roles in cost-effectively storing, managing and making this type of data readily accessible anywhere at any time on the appropriate device.
Let’s take, for example, an organization that needs data protection–a mission-critical aspect of healthcare IT–for business agility, data economics and scalability requirements. IBM Spectrum Storage can provide solutions based on different family members such as IBM Spectrum Protect, or IBM Spectrum Accelerate, or IBM Spectrum Virtualize, with other members playing supporting roles. Each on its own is an award-winning, industry-leading solution. Together, they offer a very broad spectrum of benefits to 21st century organizations looking to build a smarter healthcare industry. And only IBM offers all these solutions under a single licensing mode, IBM Spectrum Storage Suite, to accommodate changing storage needs as healthcare applications evolve.
Watch this video to see how IBM’s strategic approach handles more data, cloud vendors and storage systems than any other solution.
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