Christian Lindmark. Chief Technology Officer of Stanford Health Care (Palo Alto, Calif.): We see increased spending in our cloud environments annually and predict it will continue to accelerate in fiscal year 2023 and beyond, for both software as a service (SaaS) and public cloud. Stanford Health Care recently completed a data center consolidation project, moving from five data centers to two co-location facilities and increasing our footprint in the cloud. This is consistent with an overall trend in healthcare, with most organizations determining that owning and operating data centers is not cost-effective or efficient. Furthermore, many vendors in the healthcare space are providing SaaS solutions, eliminating the decision of on-prem versus the cloud.
Historically, when we have looked at our production environments migrating to the cloud, the total cost of ownership has overwhelmingly been more expensive on a five- to seven-year comparison — with capital costs for on-prem hardware and operating costs for management not being reduced enough to offset the increase in operating costs related to cloud spend. However, these comparisons are getting closer each year.
We have found the greatest value in native cloud deployments is with internal software development efforts and disaster recovery environments. The market is still in an early stage, and it will take a few years for some of the greatest benefits for healthcare to emerge, specifically around research data active learning/machine learning.
Additionally, sustainability is a major consideration for us at Stanford Health Care. We are committed to being leaders in improving our IT carbon footprint, and decisions we make related to our infrastructure investments and partners are key considerations moving forward, both in the cloud and on-prem.
Christian Lindmark 