Imagine attending your industry’s biggest conference to learn about new ways to elevate your business and you get the call. The one from the home office that says your network just went down.
That’s the panic I heard in an attendee’s voice at the 2022 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition in Orlando last week as he took a frantic call from one of his colleagues.
“Have they checked if it was their internet connection? Have they called the ISP? Was there an outage? What applications was it affecting? Was everyone experiencing the same thing?” From what I could gather, the person on the other end of the phone had limited technical experience and struggled to understand how to translate the attendee’s questions into action. With each question, his frustration and panic climbed as he tried to assess the impact of the outage on his company.
Any attendee at that conference could have been that person, especially with the growing number of businesses that rely on the public internet as their primary network. Healthcare organizations are part of this movement, especially as many are migrating to more cloud- and internet-based tools and platforms, such as EHRs, telehealth systems, UCaaS, and clinical decision support systems. In fact, SaaS in healthcare has increased by 20% every year since 2012
This growth was clearly reflected in the number of sessions I saw at HIMSS related to digital transformation, migration to cloud-based ecosystems, and telehealth; and the number of vendor booths touting cloud-based technologies. This aligns with our own growing number of healthcare customers who are relying on Bigleaf solutions everyday, which grew by 245% in the last year alone.
In addition to the hallway conversations, being in the exhibitor’s hall at HIMSS gave us the opportunity for several face-to-face conversations with attendees who were starting to think about the overarching impact of their cloud network’s performance.
Many of our conversations centered on common misconceptions about cloud network performance, which led to further discussion around topics like uptime:
- More bandwidth doesn’t fix internet problems that cause application performance issues
- Complete outages are not the only thing that halts business operations and patient care, but that “unusable uptime” is just as disruptive, if not more so
- There’s more to solve than just failover
- There’s a way to ensure quality performance of cloud applications without dedicating hundreds of hours creating and maintaining manual policies for traffic management
The cloud- and internet-based solutions showcased at the conference are transforming the healthcare field. It’s exciting to hear about the kinds of investments IT leaders are looking into to take their organizations to the next level – and talking to them about the importance of safeguarding those investments with a solution like Bigleaf. Because without the network stability and reliability solutions like Bigleaf can deliver, too many IT leaders will go through the stress and challenge that the gentleman I walked by earlier experienced.
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