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 Welcome to this week, health Events where we amplify great thinking with interviews from the floor. This show is, well, the show, the Him Show was canceled, but our work continues to amplify great thinking to propel Healthcare forward. Special thanks to our channel sponsors, Starbridge Advisors Health, Erics Galen Healthcare, VMware, and Pro Talent Advisors for choosing to invest in our show.

My name is Bill Russell, healthcare cio, coach and creator of this week in Health. It a set of podcast videos and collaboration events dedicated to developing the next generation of health leaders. Uh, I was scheduled to host a few panel discussions from HIMSS 20, and the guests were kind enough to carve out some time to dial into a video conference to do the, uh, virtual panel discussion.

We did one earlier this week, and this is the second, uh, on this panel. We're going to explore how cloud has changed the way . Healthcare can deliver disaster recovery capabilities. With our distinguished panel, uh, Dr. Stephanie Lar, CIO and CMIO of Monument Health. Rick Bryant, national Healthcare Architect for Veritas and Josh Peacock Healthcare Solutions advisor with Sirius.

Uh, good morning everyone. Welcome to the show. Morning. Morning, bill. Thanks for having us. Well, this, this should be fun. I mean, it's a lot easier to do these in person. You could sort of, you know, the crowd's in front of you and you sort of can see, see what their response is when you say something. Uh, but you know, these, uh, these end up being, uh, pretty fun, uh, as well.

Uh, just you don't have the crowd. I guess this is what the NCAA Final four is gonna be like. Without, without a crowd. I can't even imagine that. I mean, are they gonna pipe sounds in or something? Anybody have an idea of what they're gonna do with that? No, I haven't heard anything, but I agree. It's gotta be the, the silence must be deafening, it.

I, I guess it'll be just like a, a practice environment for them. It'll, it'll be interesting. All right, so we're, we're going to, uh. We're gonna delve into this topic of, of cloud, Dr. How cloud has really changed the dr uh, landscape. And, you know, Stephanie, let's start with you. I mean, you're, you're practicing in a health system, um, in the, in the dual role, C-I-O-C-M-I-O.

How have you seen, uh, that DR gives maybe new capabilities or new options for disaster recovery for a healthcare system? Yeah, I think, um, there are a handful of different elements that play into kind of what the opportunity is that's presented with cloud options for Dr. First. I think it's an opportunity, um, for us in healthcare, who, let's be honest, we've been a little.

Resistant and some for good reason to, um, move into cloud space. Dr is a safe place for us to sort of get our feet wet and what that technology is, um, gonna take. How, how to get that environment set up, how to ensure that we've got the skills either internally or that we are incorporating them through partnerships to be able to stand up our environment in, um.

In a, in a, something that we're not used to, but again, not with the added pressure of our production environment. The other thing is, you know, money is, is a big issue in healthcare. The margins are tight and the IT shop is being asked to do. Like everyone else, more with less. And a lot of that is focused around what can you do with dollars to innovate rather than just keeping the lights on.

And really the, um, the data center in general and having, um, duplication and a DR process is part of keeping the lights on. So I think this is also an opportunity for, for us to explore ways to be able to, um, . Either save money or change how we are spending the money so that we may have, um, people, resources or financial resources to carve out in innovation.

Sorry, this is me trying to unmute my microphone. Sorry about that. Um. So, Josh, give us an idea. So what are some of the benefits of the cloud? I mean, it, it is one of those environments that is pay for what you use. And so there there are, there is some elasticity of demand and whatnot around cloud. Give us an idea of what, what are the benefits that a health system's gonna experience as a, as a result of thinking about DR in the cloud?

Yeah, so some of the stuff that we've, we've witnessed has, uh, been some benefits, has really been. The ability to, um, establish a flexible environment that they can not have to refresh every three years, and then they're only paying for it. So the, the major significant benefits has been, um, particularly some of our applications that use a lot of Citrix, for example, we're able to spin down those hosts and we don't have to actually have 'em up and running.

And then as we spin 'em up, obviously during a dr there's um, a pretty substantial amount of money that's spent for that, but. The down, um, when it's down, they've saved a ton of money in that perspective. And then, um, also the other key that I think that's a benefit is, is instead of every three years having to refresh that tech, we literally just swap out the skew that it starts up under.

And now we've got new technology underpinning their DR solution. So it, it really has, uh, changed the way that they're buying DR And then also how they're, um, leveraging their technology. Refreshes is, uh, the keys that I've seen so far. So I, so there's a lot of benefits. I mean, clearly, you know, one of the things I, I, I take people back.

I have a lot of gray hair, so I take people back to the SunGard days, and SunGard was a, you know, was a lifesaver for me in, in a certain situation that we had. But, um, but those, those models were kind of interesting 'cause you still had to refresh the equipment even though it was in the Sung Guard environment.

You still had to pay these exorbitant contracts and they didn't really guarantee. Uptime when you needed it. It was kind of a, uh, an interesting thing. And so the cloud gives you the ability to, uh, leverage not only a single cloud, but multiple clouds to deliver the same level of services that you're doing today.

So there's, there's a lot of flexibility around it. So let's, let's, let's get pragmatic because. Some people are gonna listen to this and say, well, they're making this sound so easy. But it's, it's really not as easy as what they're, they're saying are what's, what's, so, Rick, let's, let's go to you and, and whoever else wants to jump in here.

Let's talk about the process of standing up the cloud. I assume it's, you know, it's, it's a lot like a, you know, a plan, design, implement, uh, you know, migrate support kind of model. But what, what are we looking at when a health system says, all right, we want to utilize cloud Dr. What are, what are some of the things they have to go through to get there?

Well, bill, I, I kind of chuckled when you mentioned don't let the, the long hair fool you. I was a customer of SunGard as well, and actually in one of my health institutions that I worked for, I went to the board. I was paying $80,000 a month for SunGard for what we considered plausible deniability. But when you look at the actual plan, if it's not a living, breathing plan, that's pretty much all.

It's you're paying for plausible notability. So I went back to my board and I said, here, look, here's this money. Give it back to the, the patient care. Give it. Because this isn't a plan that would actually execute. It's, it's the same scenario and it's why I think this conversation is so relevant in that when, when you have a disaster recovery and healthcare's mandated to have disaster recovery, they're required to protect PHI in every form format.

They're required to have a, a data backup, and they're required to have a disaster recovery plan. What we're going through today is a perfect example of why healthcare is so when you start talking about the look at from perspective hospital. This is, gives them the ability to actually have out of region capabilities.

Right? So it's a huge eye-opener and, and enabler for, for those smaller hospital systems that I think are sometimes struggling because of the reimbursement methods for large health health systems like Stephanie's organization, they spend a ton of money for something that's just basically sitting idle.

So when you have the capabilities now that it's matured to the point to where they can spin that up on demand, but more importantly they have the ability to. So it becomes a living, breathing capability. Um, so that they have confidence in the DR capabilities when they're needed, and then therefore be able to move to that next level of maturation to be able to spin it up on demand and eliminate all those overhead costs.

So, uh, I think it does change the model quite a bit from the old Sunguard days. So Stephanie, what are you being held accountable for? I mean, when you have to go present to the board or the executive team? And, and you talk about Dr. What are, what, what are they saying? Hey, this is what we ex expect from, uh, from the IT organization in a, in a time of disaster.

I mean, really the expectation is they, is, is business continuity. That we are able to, um, with as little as little disruption as possible, maintain the true business, uh, that we are in, which is delivering healthcare. And that, um, task. Is becoming more and more complicated because we are more and more reliant on technology in all aspects of healthcare right now.

And so having a reliable disaster recovery, um, option that, you know, to Rick's point is, um, not been just sitting on a shelf collecting dust, but that will truly spin up and will be fast. . And then can also be spun back down is absolutely the requirement. I will say to your point earlier, you know, the devil is in the details on that.

You really need to know what it is you're doing today. So as an example, in my organization, I. We have two distinct data centers. They are geographically separated. We do not live in an area, um, that is typically hit by natural disasters. Um, but we ha and we have basically total redundancy. We flip flop back and forth right now, and the teams are used to that.

If we went to, as we've been exploring our, um, our cloud DR strategy. That will be a different way of doing business, um, to the costs and different things that, that Josh and Rick both alluded to. We aren't gonna run halftime in the cloud and halftime on-prem. Um, we're going to need to have that be a reliable solution when we need it and test it when we need it.

Right now, we're, it's, we're simplifying it by basically . Flip flopping back and forth. And that will be something different that the teams are gonna have to get used to. But again, you know, the board's expectation, and I think really great boards like the one that I have, they don't wanna get in the details, but they do want enough information to know that when something happens, um, we have a plan that.

Our hospital and clinic operations will be able to be maintained. And some of what it takes in order to accomplish that is not just your, you know, technical dr. Some of that is, is downtime processes and things like that. You're going to have an opportunity to leverage those as well. The DR is not gonna be a salvation of 30 seconds and we're up.

Yeah. There's always the people process, technology part of it, so. Uh, so Josh, do we start this the same way we usually start Dr. With, with tiering the applications and, uh, you know, determining which are gonna be needed in terms of a disaster and, and those kind of things? Or, or how do we start this process?

Yeah. For, for us, um, we've been working with organizations to start with the BIA, identify the, um, the applications and their interdependencies. And then, you know, as we build those tiers out, I think one of the key things that we've also noticed with, uh, the cloud is. In previous planning exercises, it's been really easy to be like, well, we need probably about this, many of these servers and about this much of this storage, and we'll kind of figure out the rest as we go.

Um, but really we have to be far more pragmatic upfront and really define out what those systems are, what connectivity is needed for those systems. Because since it is a pay as you go and it's not just, uh, essentially pockets of technology sitting in a facility for us to work with, it's driven requirement to be far more upfront with a lot more planning and less, uh.

You know, um, just saying that we've bought enough technology to support vr, we just don't necessarily have the plan or the, the, the reason or why, why to exercise that. Josh, you bring up a good point. I want to piggyback on that. And that's the concept of being able to use the cloud for surge capacity.

That's something else that we've seen given the current disaster that's going on, is that, um, it, the, it's caused the demand and the cloud has given them the flexibility to be able to scale up and scale out rapidly. So it does give you some flexibility there. Yeah. And that's, that's what we found when we were standing up RDR in the cloud, uh, back in the health system I was in, in Southern California.

Is that, you know, the team found all sorts of uses for it in terms of, uh, you know. Significant. It became a test environment, became a patching environment, became a failover environment for a period of time while they were doing, uh, equipment upgrades in our data center. It, it really gave us a lot of flexibility that we didn't have before because before we'd have to go out and purchase, you know, a million dollars worth of equipment, stand it up in a data center, potentially have to buy

New crack units and, you know, and, and do all that work. Um, and, and that, that was really, that was an unintended consequence of the work of standing up the DR is that the operations team ended up with a lot of flexibility to provide more continuity for the day-to-day outages that we were having, uh, that we didn't anticipate.

Um. What are, you know? Alright, so we're, we're getting into this. We've done the, uh, the business impact analysis, the BIA, we've tiered the applications. What, what are some of the roadblocks? So we've tiered the applications. These are the ones we need. I assume it's the, it's the EHR. It's the ERP, it's the PAC system.

Whatnot. We need to make sure these are up in the time of an emergency. HL seven. Yeah. Right. Integration and whatnot. So what, what are gonna be some of the roadblocks as we start down this path that health systems are gonna have to overcome in order to operate in the cloud? Well, I'll take a, a first shot at some of that.

I mean, some of the things that we've ran into have been, um, some of the EMR vendors were, um. Taking their time to work through and understand what the cloud was gonna mean for them, which that took some time. I think we'll still see a lot of the departmental applications, um, be problematic because maybe smaller organizations that are providing those, they're not really sure how to support and handle that in the cloud.

Um, and the interface engine has a potential there too, just because of the fact that, um, there's a lot of IP to ip, there's a lot of technology there that is. Maybe see, maybe rooted in things that aren't as easy to change IP addresses or make that jump to the cloud. So we're really approaching a lot of that in a hybrid so that we can accomplish, um, and support both the applications that can go cloud native with us, um, as inform infrastructure and service or support things that, you know, need layered to spanning or other the, you know, deep technical needs to require that, but to really cover both sides of, uh, the needs and ensure that they can operate.

Yeah, I would add, I, I completely agree with everything, um, Josh said there. I think in addition to that, there's a lot of, um, internal . Training and, um, assessment of your team's capabilities to sort of figure out, um, what you can do on your own and where you are going to need help. I think the average health system that's moving into this space, um, probably doesn't have the internal people.

Who know exactly how to do this. Their teams aren't necessarily used to working with, um, applications in this kind of environment or this kind of infrastructure. And it is a different way of, um, of managing things. So you have to work on that assessment and then educating your teams and bringing in the right, um, additional resources to help you.

I completely agree with everyone. I think we have a number of legacy applications in this industry that can be very challenging to port to the cloud or even not even capable. And when I work with some of our customers or even some of my personal experience, there just isn't a replacement. For some of these technologies, there's some technologies that have embedded XP that they just don't have a replacement because they haven't built it on a modern day operating system.

So the hybrid environment that Josh is talking about is gonna be critical. I think in the interim for the next month, I worry about the skillset and the flexibility because we know there's a national shortage of that. I think that the offset of the cost will help organizations recruit and build that kind of technology.

Um, the EMR providers can be very protective in terms of the platforms that they support and allow, and also where their intellectual properties at, and that's appropriate in some cases. But I think that, uh, causes the industry to struggle with agility. And then, um, something we haven't really experienced yet in the healthcare industry, but we see it in others, is that once you put all this effort into a DR in a cloud scenario with provider A, let's say it's Microsoft Azure, you have this tendency to get a lock in too, so that they can manipulate or manage the pricing.

So you have to make sure that you have the flexibility to be able to change out those, um, utility companies, if you will, in this new model. So it's something that we're all gonna have to evolve to work together. Um, and, and support, but the benefits far outweigh those costs and risks. I think. So let's, we'll, we'll go through people, process and technology.

Let's start with people and skills that are going to be needed. So here's some of the things we found is we, we went to a new level of automation when we did this. Um, so we had to train people on the automation tools, and it was a different set of tools they had to become full stack. Kind of people, they had to understand storage, uh, networking and systems all the way through, uh, the entire thing, which was, uh, which was challenging to be honest with you.

And then we found we needed, we relied a lot more on a, um, on an architect. The architect became so critical, the, the, and it actually, for us, it was a team of architects. But, but essentially they designed these systems in such a way that, uh, we could fail 'em over. And they took into account the, you know, the, the things that, that required, uh, hardcoded IP addresses versus the things that were, uh, that could, the network was virtualized and we could do that.

And virtualization. How do see. Let's talk about the existing environment. You know, nobody really walks into the data center much anymore. So we've gotten beyond that. Like, oh, the, the server needs to be down the hall. Um, the server actually can be in the cloud 'cause they're doing a lot of things from their desk, but there's still a, there's still a change in terms of the skills that they need.

What kind of skills have you seen? How are we gonna go about getting people up, up on those skills? And I'm, I'm treating you guys different than the last panel. I was like calling on people. I'm just gonna throw that out there. What, what do we do in the people side of it? And then we'll go on to process and technology.

Well, I think, um, I, I'm sorry, Stephanie, please go. No, go ahead. Well, um, I, I think that I, I haven't really thought about the criticality of the architect, but yeah, that really is a new skillset. It's kind of like finding the. A technical person, someone who understands all the bits and bytes and the whole OSI model.

So that's critical. But you do have partners like Sirius for example, that are embedded and they can provide a lot of that services and support for you from an architecture. But, um, you know, the cloud frameworks are different than the typical on-prem models, and Josh can probably speak to that quite a bit.

Um, also I think, uh, being able to analyze the speeds and feeds. That they charge you for, whether it's, um, sitting idle or where they're charging for the network bandwidth or they charging you for storage. All that really changes the model from the capital or operating expenses that we're looking forward to, or that we operate on today.

So there's gonna be quite a bit of change. So I just to piggyback off of both of those comments, um, I think that, you know, the, all of this means that this is not something you decide. Okay? My 12 month plan is that we're gonna go from, I. No experience in this at all today to having a fully live DR in the cloud.

Um, I think this really needs to be viewed more as you need to be thinking three years out, um, potentially longer depending on the size and complexity of your health system. If you are thinking that far in advance, then you can take the time to, um, do some of the assessment of your teams. I mean, the cloud vendors themselves are offering opportunities to educate your teams.

Um, you can take small workloads, move them in, have them start to gain some of the experience, um, and the comfort. When the pressure is not on because there's not a massive project with a deadline looming over them. At the same time you're going through that learning curve, you have an opportunity to go through the learning curve with your executive team, um, in your, with your CFO and your heads of finance to talk about the impacts of, um, how this may change the way we've historically paid for technology.

So it's a long runway. I think if you're gonna do it well. Yeah, I think, um, we're, we're seeing, um, a pretty significant different varying groups within our client base that we're working with. Some. It's been a great conversation starter to talk about moving these things to dr. And then some of 'em have had to really settle back and help them establish that training exercise that they're gonna go through with their teams to get them up to speed, to be able to support it in day two or even during a build process.

Um, so we're, you know, have to be flexible to, to meet where they're at. Which is fine. And then we've got organizations that are, you know, they've been kind of training some people up for a while and they're ready to go kind of full speed ahead. And so we've got, you know, those varying degrees. And then also I think, um, one of the things that we've, that I've witnessed already is the fact that there's a lot of people out in healthcare right now that are really interested, really excited to go do stuff in cloud.

And I'm talking all the way down at the, you know, at the admin level, the engineer level. We're really excited about going to get it done. And then I also think it helps healthcare attract. The next generation of health, I care healthcare IT people to, you know, carry us into the next, uh, um, the next decades and ensure that, you know, they're, they see something exciting to work on as well and, and new, and that we're not kind of stuck in the old ways.

You know, Josh, you said something I'd like to piggyback on and I find that interesting in that, uh, if you take Microsoft for example, they have mandatory Azure spend in there. So organizations that have ELAs are paying for cloud usage and capacity anyway, so they're kind of encouraging everybody. Move into the cloud and to Stephanie's point, you know, try with some smaller workloads or noncritical workloads to be able to build that experience.

But I think there, uh, more and more you're gonna see every industry push to either software as a service or cloud-based, um, solutions. Yeah. It's in, it's interesting, when we move to the cloud, my team kept coming into my office going, Hey, the tools work in the cloud too. You know, SQL on Azure is. Pretty similar to SQL in our data center.

And I was like, yeah, like Microsoft's not gonna completely upend the, the apple cart. They would, they wanna make that, uh, easy. But I know we want to get to talking about technology because vendor lock-in is a, is a real, is a real deal. We need to create those layers of abstraction. We'll get to that. But I wanna talk about, uh, process real quick.

How different. Is, uh, are the processes for dr, are they pretty, pretty standard? Are they the, the, the same for, uh, declaring a disaster moving over? Is it, is it pretty similar or is it, is it fundamentally different in the cloud? I mean, my opinion is, it should be easier. Um, typically speaking, a lot of the DR strategies we were using before, um.

They were clunky and difficult to execute on sometimes. And so you, um, had a higher threshold for making the decision to, to leverage those. So, um, I, I think in general, the goal should at least be, um, that if you've done it well, the decisions should be much more pure and, um, and clean than maybe they've historically been.

When we were worried about sort of the flip side. I think for me, I'm, my only concern is, is that if there's a set dollar amount that we expect a day to run in the cloud for DR. Is versus they already have the technology, everything's there in our kind of traditional dr then maybe that would weigh in on how soon they declare and, and make a switch.

Um, but I think part of that's just helping them understand that the process of moving to DR and leveraging that in in scenarios. Should be an asset and not a, something we should be scared of. We should use it. When there's issues or significant things that need to be done that turn it to be an asset and really leverage it when it makes sense.

I, I'll tell you, Josh, I mean, being in the CIO's chair, the hardest thing for me was declaring a disaster. I mean, I had to sit back and go, all right, are we gonna de declare? Because I knew what it meant. I mean, I had to scramble people all over the place. They were gonna, you know, different work hours started to kick in.

Uh, and, and it's not only declaring and getting over to it, which is a, a herculean effort in some cases, but getting back. Was a, a big deal, uh, in, in some cases. And so it was a huge deal and I'm, I'm hoping, and I, I know we're not there yet even with the cloud, but I'm hoping that this gets to be more of a, uh, more of a thing where it's not even ACIO decision that's somebody in the operations level just goes, yeah, hey, let's just flip over to the, to the cloud and then we'll, we'll flip back.

And, and the operations people that the clinicians don't even recognize that, that the transition ha, I, I realize we have to architect an awful lot of applications to get here, but isn't that where we want to get to? Well, I hope the CIO is still involved because there's gonna be cost implications. Right.

But it should be that easy. And let's take that scenario you were talking about. I remember there was a declaration. Fee for, uh, Sunguard. And a lot of times that fee was not necessarily in your operational budget, but it could be covered by any type of insurance. Were there an actual disaster? So the cloud takes away all that, uh, declaration fee, and it also gives you that guaranteed capacity.

Where I remember back in the days, if, if you didn't declare early enough, they couldn't g even guarantee your services. And, and the infrastructure support, it was based on a first come first serve. So the cloud changes that model quite a bit. Um, similarly, uh, the, the, the, the trouble that we had in terms of being able to make a declaration and then operating it in a different environment was that once you started writing to the databases, like you said, it was a nightmare to bring it back.

But the technology has advanced to the point to where the auto, it'll automatically do that stuff for. It'll shut it down. And we've actually demonstrated this in the cloud, um, with the, the demo with one of our partners and, um, with Sirius, and that it'll, um, make sure that the replication reverses shut down the services and then bring it back up on site.

So a lot of that difficulty and manual effort has, can now be automate. I just wanna say one quick thing on the, um, elements related to cost. I think it does highlight another conversation that needs to happen. That's not one that maybe we've typically had, which is, um, a conversation with your internal legal counsel and your insurers.

Um, it is something that you need to have the discussion about, um, because. Yes, it can be very expensive every day to run that if you are in the middle of a disaster. It is also true as, um, Rick mentioned that there, there may be part of your insurance coverage that would, um, that would cover that. And that's not something we're typically used to thinking about our insurance paying for, um, in a disaster situation.

So it's important to know if that's the world that you're living in or not. And if it isn't and you're making this transition, something you wanna investigate. Yep. Absolutely. Uh, now I want to talk about the technology and I didn't clear with you guys whether I'm allowed to talk about it. So I, I saw you guys do a demo of a major EHR and a failover scenario.

It was, it was pretty impressive. 'cause the, the EHR wasn't nec, the EHR in general, it doesn't matter which one I'm talking about, was not designed. For this kind of scenario, and you guys demonstrated it, which gives, gives sort of an indication that even applications that aren't designed for it, if you can, you can architect around some of those limitations and, and still make it work.

Um, Josh, was I supposed to talk about that or not? Not allowed to talk about that. Uh, um, we probably wanna limit it a little bit, but, uh, it's been, uh, it was fine. I mean, that was in conjunction with a partner. It was an exploration. Um, it worked well. I mean, at the end of the day. Um, we're really treating cloud as infrastructure as a service in that standpoint.

And so whether or not it's on a Windows server virtualized on VMware in their data center or the cloud, um, those pieces are, are really there. So, so let's take it this way. Instead of talking about that specific, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to group our applications, right? There's cloud native applications, there's uh, there's legacy applications, there's applications that are still on client server.

There's. Let's hope there's not servers that still need dongles to run and those kind of things, but, but literally, healthcare has that breath. Of of things. What are we gonna do? What, what does the technology stack look like to handle all those things? Are there just things that we just go that is not gonna run and then we start moving up the, the stack to the things that actually can, can function well?

I, I'll take one last, uh, another shot at the technology perspective. So we really do feel that it is gonna be a hybrid. And so for what we're really focused on is how we're looking at a. Colo, uh, facility that is in very close adjacency to a cloud region that we work in. 'cause there are certain, um, pieces of, of healthcare that we tend to be monolithic and build very up in our designs.

Um, for a lot of those databases and things from traditional background, um, where cloud native items always scale out, right? So in the cloud we don't necessarily have the biggest, largest, um, capabilities of handling the most extreme. Scale up solutions. And then also a lot of those, like we talked about earlier too, um, applications and things that just aren't capable of making the jump to the cloud.

So we're accommodating those in a, in a colo hybrid solution. And then everything else we can pretty much accommodate, I think, um, pretty easily within the cloud though. And while I appreciate, um, a partner like Sirius's effort to do something in a hybrid situation, I think it actually also presents a unique opportunity as you look at those applications, um, that let's be honest, are gonna really be challenging to, to move.

The reality is. Moving them to the cloud is probably not the only challenge you are dealing with from the standpoint of that application. And it might be time to think about is there something, does it just need to be upgraded? And it's been a departmental application that's been sort of left to sit on the shelf.

Is there newer technology that could be used to. Replace that. Um, so I actually think it allows an opportunity for conversations with some of the operational and other team members to say, Hey, we've all set out toward this goal. We wanna support you the best as possible when we're in this, you know, future situation.

So we really need to take a look at what are those applications that might need to be, um. Either replaced or significantly updated, and again, it kind of forces the conversation. So you may not do it all at once, but I think it's an opportunity to open those conversations up. Excellent point. And I think, uh, I, I completely agree.

I think that our industry especially could really benefit some from some platform rationalization in that I think we bought a lot of technologies based on specific needs without looking at the interoperability, for example. That's been a big conversation in our industry or you know, the forward progression and updates to that.

But there are commonalities. There's like, for example, the presentation layer. Presentation layer for one application is very similar to the presentation layer. So you can move those heavy workloads into that environment while you're working to move some of the other monolithic architectures either out of your organization or up into that cloud.

So it's kind of a journey, but I think there's a piece that can be universally applied. You know what's interesting, as Stephanie was talking there, it, it made me chuckle. 'cause I, I remembered back when we were moving to the cloud, you know, that kind of event was, was phenomenal for our team. First of all, our inventory had never been as

Accurate as it was on the days that we were doing that. The second thing is, as they started to, to, uh, go out and talk to the departments about the applications, a lot of the departments were like, oh, we didn't even know I had that application. And we literally shut off 10% of our applications just because no one was using them anymore.

Now we archived them appropriately and those kinda things, but it was just, it was just, uh, an an, an exercise like this is so valuable to the CIO that I, I'd almost recommend it to anyone, uh, as, as Stephanie says, in a three, three year, five year plan to think about what, because it makes you think about what skills are my team gonna need in three years?

And it also makes you do the inventory. It also makes you, you know, just think through the processes and it also makes you think through . What do I want Dr to look like in three years? And I do want it to look like the, they're not coming to me. I already have it factored into my budget and they're, they're just going, Hey, we're having a problem with this storage.

We run the risk of that going down. Let's go ahead and fail it over. And then when they're done fixing the storage, they just fail it back. And I go. And they just come in and say to me, Hey, we used the backup system for four hours. And actually they wouldn't come to me, they'd just go to the finance person for it and say, Hey, we're gonna use DR for four hours.

I go, yeah, that's great. We'll build it into our budget. So anyway, uh, you guys have been great. Uh, fantastic panel. Uh, Josh, Stephanie, Rick, uh, where, where can they go anywhere for more information if they wanted more information on this? I didn't give you guys a heads up on that question, but Yeah, absolutely.

Um, I think, yeah, if you, if you're looking for a solution-based type of approach, I would go to our partner Sirius. Um, they're really embedded and understand the nuances of the technology. And of course, Veritas. We're very happy to engage with you to help you understand the underlying technology that you need.

Fantastic. No, I appreciate that. Um, I'm gonna do the close. Uh, don't forget to check back multiple times. This week we're gonna be doing a couple more interviews. This shows the production of this week in Health It. For more great content, check out the website this week, health.com and the YouTube channel.

Thanks for listening. That's all for now.