Healthcare IT leaders are under constant pressure to navigate competing priorities as they work to modernize, innovate, and protect their environment. They must transform infrastructure and ensure fast, reliable data access across EHRs, imaging, and analytics platforms. They need to support growing demands for AI and advanced analytics. And through it all, they are expected to maintain uptime and protect sensitive data.
In response, many organizations make storage decisions that feel practical in the moment. But those short-term fixes can create long-term problems: rising complexity, limited scalability, and escalating costs. Over time, they reduce agility and slow the very systems clinicians rely on to provide timely, effective care.
In a new guide, Pure Storage examines five of the most common storage-related missteps healthcare organizations make and shares how they can be addressed with strategies that support stronger performance, resilience, and care delivery.
When short-term thinking creates long-term friction
It’s not always a single big decision that leads to infrastructure challenges. Often, it’s a series of incremental choices: deploying a point solution for a department, extending the life of a familiar legacy system, or assuming that yesterday’s backup strategy can still handle today’s ransomware landscape.
These decisions may solve immediate needs, but they often lead to:
- Slower access to imaging, electronic records, and diagnostics, delaying workflows and frustrating clinicians
- Fragmented systems that limit collaboration and reduce visibility across the care continuum
- Greater exposure to downtime or ransomware attacks due to outdated recovery plans
- Higher infrastructure and cloud costs that are hard to justify or predict
- Barriers to scaling AI, analytics, and remote care workflows that rely on fast, fluid data access
Healthcare delivery has changed dramatically in recent years. Clinical environments are more connected, data-intensive, and geographically dispersed than ever before. Many storage environments in healthcare were not designed to meet the demands of real-time clinical operations, distributed care models, or AI workloads. As data volumes surge and expectations evolve, these limitations become harder to ignore, in addition to being more costly to maintain.
A better foundation for care delivery
Whether it’s a radiologist reviewing a scan, a specialist accessing a patient’s record from a different site, or a research team running large-scale analytics, delays in data access ripple across the care experience.
Modern healthcare depends on a storage strategy that not only performs at scale, but also simplifies day-to-day operations. It must protect data without adding complexity, enable cloud flexibility without incurring unpredictable costs, and support growth without causing disruption.
Pure Storage helps healthcare providers:
- Consolidate fragmented systems to reduce complexity and improve data access
- Accelerate imaging, EHR, and analytics performance with high-throughput infrastructure
- Strengthen ransomware recovery and cyber resilience with built-in safeguards
- Scale across on-premises and cloud environments without hidden fees or re-architecture
- Maintain availability with always-on infrastructure and non-disruptive upgrades
What you’ll get in the guide
The 5 Common Storage Decision Mistakes and How to Avoid Them guide breaks down the most frequent pain points facing healthcare IT teams today—from siloed departmental storage to legacy systems that slow down AI initiatives. It includes:
- Tips for identifying storage capabilities that improve performance, resilience, and long-term flexibility
- Actionable guidance for teams looking to reduce complexity, improve resilience, and support faster care without major disruption
- Insights informed by Pure Storage engagements with healthcare organizations
Whether your team is planning a long-term infrastructure refresh or addressing urgent performance gaps, this guide is designed to help you assess your environment, avoid common missteps, and move toward a more agile and resilient foundation.
See how you can reduce risk, simplify infrastructure, and unlock faster, more informed decisions by rethinking your storage strategy.
Download the guide: 5 Common Storage Decision Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
