In a recent article in Healthcare Facilities Today, Data center infrastructure management in healthcare: The physical world meets the virtual world and the ‘cloud’, Sev Onyshkevych, chief marketing officer at FieldView Solutions, notes that the healthcare industry and healthcare IT is particularly vulnerable as the world moves inexorably toward all things “cloud”. Nothing is truly “virtual”; there are physical repercussions for everything.
Onyshkevych says: “IT professionals, occasionally lose sight of the fact that the computing and storage are actually physically taking place on some physical device.”
He’s correct of course. Healthcare infrastructure and data center assets must be carefully tracked in accordance with HIPAA, PIPEDA and other data privacy regulations. Perhaps because of this fact, Onyshkevych notes that “It is no coincidence that healthcare is an industry with one of the highest adoption rates of DCIM tools.”
He summarizes his thoughts saying that healthcare IT cannot ignore physical asset concerns and he calls for management tools that provide physical as well as virtual monitoring and tracking of IT assets.
I would add that healthcare IT is an especially good fit for an RFID IT Asset Management solution. The migration of assets from data centers to consolidated data centers, colo facilities or cloud data centers has driven the need for a solution like RFID technology to better manage migration. An RFID solution is portable, cost-effective to deploy and operate and provides real, tangible and accurate information for data center teams to act upon.
In that way, perhaps the healthcare industry and healthcare IT is a good patient for data center IT Asset Management.
