Microsoft Azure – the cloud for health care applications
In recent years, the advancement of technologies and their adoption by mainstream consumers have created numerous business opportunities for healthcare companies. However, with such a growth, the modern health care companies have also realized that in order to continue growth, they must be able to execute faster and scale effortlessly while also spending less money. These business drivers have led to an explosive growth in the adoption of Cloud among healthcare organizations.
On March 26th 2015, at the Healthcare Technology Forum’s meet-up in Menlo Park, Casey Watson, a Sr. Program Manager for Microsoft, talked about the importance of cloud technology for healthcare companies and discussed ways in which organizations can stay ahead of curve using Azure, the cloud computing platform from Microsoft. Azure offers a growing collection of integrated services for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. It provides both PaaS and IaaS services, and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.
Casey also highlighted that by supporting integration with LOB systems and third party services, enabling platform independent service delivery, and complying with evolving data security needs, Azure presents a perfect solution for healthcare organizations. Azure is HIPPA complaint and provides a flexible heterogeneous development environment with in-built support for all major programming languages, CMS, Devices, Operating Systems, and Databases – all building blocks of a great healthcare application. Azure supports each layer of application architecture – the data layer to meet all data warehousing and storage needs, the application layer to develop applications using flexible computing infrastructure and hosting apps in a scalable, reliable environment, the integration layer to integrate on-premise applications to the cloud, and the access controlled layer that provides a comprehensive identity and access management cloud solution.
This flexibility and power provided by Azure has also resonated well with Industry. Azure has become the only platform selected by Oracle for their services. According to Casey Watson “The Azure data centers are running in more than twice the regions that of AWS and more than fives times the regions that of Google Cloud.” Azure also provides complete support, and free resources and training for companies willing to use the cloud platform. Overall Microsoft’s cloud computing software service provides an excellent opportunity for companies of all sizes (startups to large corporations) operating in healthcare, retail, manufacturing or government to build applications using Azure platform.
