Move your business or move to the cloud

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Moving physical information - the old days
In the old days moving to an other location was a hell of a job. The basement contained more than ten kilometers archive. Stored there for years to come. Most files are kept because of legislation. Although some files are kept to be sure instead of sorry.

Moving physical information - put it in the datacenter
In the last say ten years things changed. Is it possible to digitize these paper files? Can we store the data on disk to avoid the enormous growth of storage room needed? Indeed we can to a certain amount. Still legislations was a boundary or is it just us not wanting to change?

Another mind shift caused change. Why not (re)use the data? Make it available in a more profitable way to the organization? Technologie provided us with a portal, search engines to make data available. We even managed to interpreted the data and turned it into information and nowadays we taking steps to knowledge be reusing and recombining the retrieved information.

Still we suffer from cold feet. Security and access rights trow a spanner in the works. In order to satisfy our sense of security we want to keep the data closeby and keep information hidden for the organization.

I know it is not easy and can feel uncomfortable to embrace change, but you know, we have to in order to move forward. Consider the following story and decide for your self if this is what we wish to keep doing. Is this where we want to put our money?

Move your business - physically

The city of Den Bosch in the south of the Netherlands is building a new hospital. It is located near the new constructed center called 'Paleiskwartier'. In the end three hospitals will move from 6 locations to one new modern hospital in the center of the city.

Jeroen Bosch Hospital is moving to a new location

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It will be close to the railstation and a lot of facilities you expect near to a modern hospital.
In order to manage information effective and efficiënt the hospital has there information about their patient digital available. The physician and the nursing staff have the needed information at hand immediatly when needed.

Down in the cellar their are no paper files left. All data is stored digitaly, even information is available to the organization. More than a year ago the hospital decided to move to this new location. A huge opperation with a big impact

Moving the archive (probably a more than 30km paper equivalent) which is digitized is a complete other kind of operation. The equipment where these files are stored have to be deinstalled from the original datacenter, shiped to the new location and installed in the new datacenter. This is far beyond normal operation.

System managers are used to fade out old equipement, moving data to new hardware and keeping systems operational. But once the equipement is litteraly going offline and is loaded in a truck other professionals are moved in.

Risks of moving

Moving this kind of delicate equipment, still mounted in their origional 19 inch racks with this huge amount of information installed, needs years of preperation. When the operation is started it has to be finished as sceduled till all equipment is installed, tested and proved operational in the new datacenter.

Taking out 'hibernating' information out of the safity of the datacenter is a risk for security, will interupt normal availability and continuity and therefore all aspects of risk are breached.

Moving the equipment physically will impact even more to the risk of loss. Ofcourse the data itself is backed up and the restore procedures are tested and proved. But these measures are invented in case of problems and these has to prevented in the first place. So the route from the old to the new location is analysed. Obstacles are removed, meaning litteraly removing bumps so the truck will move as smooth as possible.

The adjustments to the route made this operation complex and very costly. This made me courious. There is another way to move information from one location to the other, we use it every day. Why not removing every obstacle that is causing all these risks in the first place? The fact that the information is stored on these physical assets causes these complexity in the operation.

Moving your Business or moving to the cloud

If the retrieval of information, the collaboration services and the dossiers of the patients where located in a cloud, the operation described would take about a second. True, moving to a cloud based infrastructure is not a walk in the park. It is a big challenge and a lot of chief officers responsible for all aspects of secure and high quality information have second thoughts about moving to the cloud. But when you start planning and preparing to move your business, you might considering moving to the cloud.