The three key characteristics that define the nature of data growth are known as the three V’s.
- Volume: Total amount of data created.
- Velocity: The speed at which data is created.
- Variety: Number of data in the incoming format.
All three Vs are increasing exponentially, posing significant challenges to organizations as a whole. The healthcare industry is no exception and is actually at the forefront.
Data state
Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google and Alphabet, once said: “From the dawn of civilization to 2003, 5 exabytes of information were created; now that amount of information is being created every two days, and the pace is accelerating.” Masu.”
That was in 2010. Now it’s 2024, and the increased pace has led to an estimated 463 exabytes of data being created every day.
Updating Schmidt’s observations, we get: From the dawn of civilization to 2003, 5 exabytes of information were created; today, that amount of information is created approximately every 14 minutes, and the rate is increasing.
Moreover, that data is available from an unprecedented number of sources and in more formats than ever before. Consider the massive increase in video and audio conferencing during the coronavirus-induced work-from-home revolution. Once a face-to-face meeting, each online meeting now generates gigabytes of video and audio recordings.
In summary, we and our machines are producing data of all kinds faster than ever before, and in almost unfathomable amounts.
Healthcare industry data
Medical care is also not unrelated. In fact, it is leading the way. According to estimates, 30% of the world’s data is generated by the healthcare industry, with the compound annual growth rate of healthcare data outpacing media and entertainment, financial services, and even manufacturing.
The rise in virtual healthcare over the past few years is clearly a source of a wealth of new data, but it’s not the only one. Everything is going digital, even in-person patient visits, and we’re hearing more and more about health care providers wearing body cameras during exams, similar to those worn by police officers during traffic stops. I am.
Not to mention electronic medical records, clinical and administrative data, wearables, connected healthcare devices, medical tracker mobile apps, and research.
The growing challenge of medical data
The benefits of all this data are undeniable. These include more informed decisions, better diagnoses, increased operational efficiency, and improved patient satisfaction, but they also pose significant challenges:
- Cost – All stored data has a cost, either in terms of hardware costs or cloud service provider (CSP) fees. And in most cases, it’s both. Today’s healthcare organizations are typically best served by a hybrid multicloud environment. In this environment, some applications and data are hosted on a public CSP and some remain on-premises. However, data shows that organizations often end up overspending on cloud services by up to 70% without realizing the expected value from them. This includes data protection and management solutions that are not built for hybrid multicloud infrastructure.
- Complexity – With the rise of hybrid multicloud computing, healthcare provider data is now highly complex with dozens of workloads in multiple public cloud environments and even more in on-site data centers. distributed across multiple data assets, all likely using disparate management tools.
- Security – As complexity increases, so does the number of potential vulnerabilities in a healthcare organization’s attack surface, increasing the risk of data breaches from threats such as ransomware. Not only that, but it will also be more difficult to recover from attacks.
- Compliance – Similarly, as complexity increases, it also becomes difficult to ensure appropriate data privacy guardrails are in place for data spread across hybrid multicloud infrastructures, increasing the likelihood of regulatory compliance violations and subsequent penalties. Masu.
Tackle these challenges head on
Although these challenges are significant, they are not insurmountable.
To overcome these challenges, healthcare organizations must first integrate data protection and management. Having end-to-end visibility and control over your entire data estate from all public cloud service providers to on-premises data centers on one pane of glass is key to reducing the cost and complexity of hybrid multi-server. cloud environment.
However, the reality is that most of today’s data protection and management technologies are not ideally suited to operate in these environments. Instead, implement cloud-optimized data management at scale that applies web-scale technologies to more cost-effective, efficient, and secure data protection from edge to core to cloud. and management.
Second, automate data protection and management. Today’s hybrid multicloud environments already make it difficult for IT teams to keep up with data protection and management needs. And as the amount of data healthcare organizations generate continues to grow and ransomware attacks and other threats become more of a threat, the challenges will only grow. Data integrity will continue to increase and data privacy regulations will become more stringent.
The key is AI-driven technology that can fully autonomously self-provision, self-optimize, and self-heal data protection and management services for the vast amounts of data in the hybrid multicloud environments that healthcare organizations rely on.
The conclusion is
The explosion of medical data shows no signs of slowing down. Understand the proliferation of healthcare data and the challenges it creates by leveraging data protection and management integration and automation.
Photo: siraanamwong, Getty Images
