For the past several years, hospital systems have tentatively begun to experiment with public clouds. The attractiveness of moving certain workloads to the cloud and the potential cost savings had to be balanced with the issue of data security.
Much has changed in the past year. In collaboration with Jack Lyons, Citrix senior director healthcare ISVs, I’d like to provide an update on what we’ve experienced over the last twelve months in our field interactions with healthcare partners and customers. There’s a great deal to share.
Citrix electronic health records EHR partners have begun to invest in public cloud testing with Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others. Logically, our partners have begun to test, and in many cases, support Citrix Cloud services as a tool to support EHR application delivery.
Citrix Cloud services differ from conventional cloud offerings by enabling application access in any public, private cloud, as well as on-premises applications that might reside within the hospital’s datacenter. At its heart, Citrix Cloud simply moves the Citrix management plane to a hosted environment, which is managed, maintained, and kept evergreen by Citrix and its team of highly skilled engineers. Whether you decide to move all applications to a cloud platform, or have specific application and or data requirements that need to remain on-premises, hospital leaders have the ability to host what they need, where they need it and manage it all through the same pane of glass. It is important to note that Citrix Cloud does not store your actual patient data, rather that resides in the location of your choice (on-premises or in a public cloud).
Citrix and the healthcare industry have long been linked and have included many strategic partnerships across the healthcare information technology spectrum. Historically, Citrix has been the dominant solution to securely deliver critical applications and data to more than five million caregivers across the U.S. — Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, MEDITECH and other healthcare software companies use our solutions to deploy their EHR suites to their customers. Our forte is the secure delivery of healthcare applications and data.
Cerner, hosts over 400,000 concurrent users daily with Citrix Virtual Apps. Epic has standardized on Citrix Virtual Apps and Citrix networking technology to support its hosting capabilities. Epic provides the ‘Epic Cloud Considerations’ document, which lists Citrix Cloud as a supported method for cloud-based deployments. (Please see Epic’s User Web for more details).
Support of Citrix Cloud for Hyperspace deployments is expected to ignite market interest and facilitate the use and associated benefits of Citrix Cloud and Citrix Cloud services. Hybrid deployments, which are expected to persist in the market, will be beneficial to many. Typical healthcare application needs suggest that a mix of public or private cloud use, along with on-premises hospital-based applications will be the model into the future. Citrix Cloud is designed to facilitate this approach.
Whether it is presenting clinical applications or hosting virtual desktops via Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops, securely connecting people and places with Citrix ADC, using Citrix Unified Endpoint Management and Citrix Content Collaboration to deploy and manage mobile users and their devices, and securely connect end users with the data they need to operate efficiently, Citrix has the right solution for your needs.
- Reach out to your Citrix sales representative for more information.
- Learn more about Citrix solutions for healthcare.
- Learn more about how Citrix Cloud services can enable your healthcare cloud strategy by reading this blog post.
- Watch Citrix Cloud services demos.
