IT Challenges – A Common Part of Acquisitions
IT is one area that faces significant challenges after an acquisition, specifically around dealing with legacy technologies from the company being acquired. For example, IT must often grapple with how to keep two disparate data centers in operations, while working to migrate the acquired companies’ systems, applications and data. The inability to connect the disparate systems in a reasonable timeframe can often impact both patient care and the ability to quickly recognize value for the transaction.
Mergers and acquisitions in healthcare have proved fertile ground for security breaches as a result of combining and sometimes overhauling existing IT systems. Since full transparency between pieces of the M&A puzzle is rarely a given, teams must consider the physical, application, and network securities of their network architecture first and foremost, particularly in light of new compliance standards and the increasing threat of malware attack.
Often the challenges of bringing the various IT systems together are not easily overcome due to the limitations of legacy hardware technologies, including the very network infrastructure that is vital to an organization. There are a lot of unknowns involved in the M&A process, and healthcare IT teams need a trusty sidekick to keep IT processes smooth, speedy, and secure at all levels.
Enter Network Virtualization
The adoption of server virtualization over the past decade has resulted in a completely new operational model for provisioning and managing application workloads in the hospital data center. The ability for a server to be dynamic – i.e., to treat physical compute (hosts) as a pool of CPU, memory and storage capacity that can be consumed and repurposed on demand – transformed the server market landscape and saved businesses billions of dollars. However, the operating model of the network to which these dynamic workloads are connected has not kept pace.
A network virtualization platform software will virtualize the network and will deliver the entire networking and security model. The platform decouples the network from the underlying hardware, yet takes advantage of the existing network infrastructure without changes to enable new levels of service delivery speed, agility and cost reductions. With network virtualization, healthcare organizations gain a completely new operational model for networking that breaks through current network barriers and enables data center operators to achieve significantly better agility and improved economics.
The Benefits of Network Virtualization
Implementing network virtualization has a number of benefits for healthcare organizations. These include:
1. Extending the life of networking hardware
Virtualization and server hardware improvements extend server life. Clustering technologies can compensate for the increased risk of server hardware failure, giving administrators another option to extend a server’s useful life. Virtualizing networking services allows workloads to move off of the networking hardware, extending the life and usefulness of the networking hardware.
2. Consolidating data centers
As part of an acquisition IT will need to keep two disparate data centers operating, while migrating the acquired companies’ systems, applications and data. In this case, network virtualization allows IT to keep both data centers running and provision services at their pace so that parties on both sides experience no down time while the two separate data centers are merged.
3. Keeping the data center secure
In a secure multi-tenancy environment, multiple customers share the same application, running on the same operating system, on the same hardware. The distinction between the customers is achieved during application design, thus customers do not share or see each other’s data. This means that customers can use the same hardware without compromising the security of their data.
Today, with software-defined infrastructure and the emergence of network virtualization, IT has a real opportunity to serve as a strategic advisor to healthcare organizations during an acquisition. With a proper network virtualization deployment, healthcare organizations can accelerate integration of disparate data centers, improve operational efficiencies, and control costs as applications and information are consolidated.
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