The dilemma about on-premises vs cloud PACS is common to hospitals, radiology groups, and medical imaging startups alike. It’s only natural for the decision makers at these practices to be concerned about data security, accessibility, and costs. However, some of these concerns are misconceptions, and therefore making business decisions based on these could be detrimental to your practice.
The purpose of this blog is to bust some of the common myths about the cloud and provide you with a clear comparison between on-premises and cloud PACS so that you can decide what’s best for your practice.
Myth 1: Cloud provider can sell my data
This is simply not true. You retain full ownership of your data even when stored on RamSoft servers. Your data is situated in a fully dedicated and segregated storage account. You can rest assured that there are no legal provisions in any contracts or terms of use, where RamSoft assumes otherwise.
Myth 2: Cloud server is only for large facilities
When it comes to cloud, size doesn’t matter. Cloud is perfect for any sized company, specifically so for small and medium-sized entities that do not have a large in-house IT staffing. All the overhead of running and securing an infrastructure are eliminated. Also, a lot of large enterprise-grade features, such as data resiliency, are included in the offering, by default, for all customers regardless of size.
Myth 3: Cloud server is more expensive than on-premises
With cloud, you’ll have no hardware cost, no server room maintenance, and no need for a dedicated in-house resource taking care of the server. Cloud is more cost-effective even if full costs are taken into consideration over the full life span of a solution. In the case of on-premises servers, the hardware has high upfront costs as well as recurring (3-5 year) refresh costs, whereas cloud only has a monthly operating expenditure. Hardware, and specifically hardware related issues, can result in significant technician labor costs.
Now that we’ve dispelled these myths about the cloud, let us understand what makes cloud-based imaging solutions superior to on-premise.
Improved data security
Cloud servers can keep your data safe not just from cyberattacks but also from natural disasters. All your diagnostic imaging data remains safe from threats because it is stored and backed up by multiple servers in different geographic locations based on Azure GRS based Blob Storage. As you are aware, the medical community has been plagued by ransomware attacks over the past several years. RamSoft has assisted customers who suffered such an attack, migrate to the cloud where the threat is significantly decreased.
Better accessibility
A cloud PACS offers quick and secure access from anywhere, which makes it the best-suited solution for remote reading. Unlike on-prem servers, you don’t need to set up VPN connection for each new location.
High data availability
Outages due to hardware issues or improper configuration can result in significant downtime and income loss. With cloud, you don’t have to worry about hardware failure and downtime that are common to on-premises servers. Our PACS hosted on Microsoft Azure guarantees 99.9% uptime. In fact, Microsoft has proven a significantly higher infrastructure SLA track record over the past several years.
Seamless scalability
Need more storage? No problem. Azure Blob storage has practically an unlimited scalability potential which is fully automated. RamSoft technicians also monitor all aspects of your application and scale up resources as necessary.
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