What Healthcare CIOs Should Prioritize as They Modernize Their Epic Infrastructure
Healthcare Organizations Should Place Workloads Deliberately
The choice between public cloud and on-premises infrastructure is rarely cut-and-dried. Cloud platforms can provide rapid provisioning, geographic flexibility and scalable access to analytics and AI services, while on-premises systems can provide predictable performance, low latency, local data control and greater certainty for core production workloads.
“Rather than choosing one environment for everything, health systems can place workloads where they fit best,” Kopinski says.
A deliberate hybrid architecture might keep Epic production services on-premises while using the cloud for development, testing, analytics or disaster recovery. That division can preserve responsiveness for clinical applications while giving IT teams elasticity for workloads with variable or temporary demand.
Placement decisions should reflect clinical criticality, latency, recovery objectives, data sensitivity and demand variability.
Why Building an Isolated Recovery Path Is Necessary in Healthcare
Epic’s isolated recovery environment (IRE) model shows how hybrid infrastructure can be valuable for resilience: A health system can operate Epic production services on-premises while replicating protected data to a segregated cloud or secondary environment.
Immutable snapshots, replication and regular recovery testing provide the foundations for bringing essential EHR functions back safely after a cyber incident.
“That creates a minimal viable EHR that can support patient care when a cyber event happens,” Kopinski says. “It doesn’t necessarily require full migration to the cloud.”
Recovery planning should identify the minimum applications, data and integrations needed to continue care and establish who can authorize restoration, coupled with testing to confirm recovered data is clean and usable, he adds.
Everpure’s Enterprise Data Cloud provides a common data layer and control plane across on-premises, hosted cloud, public cloud and edge environments.
That approach applies consistent policies for provisioning, protection, placement, governance and monitoring, while Everpure Data Intelligence helps make clinical, imaging, financial and protected health data discoverable, classified and contextualized.
