Tech ONTAP Podcast Episode 399 – The T-Systems Health Hybrid Cloud

Summary by ChatGPT

How COVID Accelerated Healthcare IT Transformation: A Deep Dive with Industry Experts

The healthcare industry has long been known for its cautious approach to technology, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced a dramatic shift. In a fascinating new podcast episode, Scott Charles from T-Systems ([email protected]), and Brian O’Mahony from NetApp ([email protected]), break down how the healthcare sector has evolved in response to the pandemic and the role technology plays in this transformation. They explore the challenges and opportunities healthcare organizations have faced, with a focus on cloud computing, hybrid solutions, and data management.

Healthcare IT in the Post-COVID Era

One of the major shifts highlighted in the episode is the rapid deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices. These devices, which were once confined to hospitals and clinics, quickly made their way into patients’ homes to enable remote monitoring. COVID-19 forced healthcare providers to rethink patient engagement, and as a result, the adoption of virtual healthcare skyrocketed. Technologies like telemedicine and remote patient monitoring drastically improved the patient experience and will likely remain integral to healthcare delivery moving forward.

The pandemic also accelerated the use of cloud-based solutions in healthcare, which had been met with resistance in the past due to security concerns. The speakers point out that even on-premise systems are vulnerable, and moving to the cloud—whether fully or in a hybrid approach—has proven to be a more secure and efficient choice for healthcare organizations.

Reducing IT Stress with the Right Tools

The conversation dives deeper into the issue of technical debt in healthcare. IT staff in healthcare settings are often overburdened, working with legacy systems that create vulnerabilities. The experts at T-Systems explain how shifting healthcare workloads to the cloud, particularly with hybrid models, helps reduce IT staff stress. This approach enables healthcare providers to focus on patient care rather than managing outdated IT infrastructure.

NetApp’s technology plays a crucial role in this transformation, simplifying the storage management process through seamless integration across on-prem, private, and public cloud environments. This hybrid cloud approach allows healthcare organizations to evolve at their own pace while minimizing risk and maintaining high levels of service.

Navigating the Multi-Cloud Landscape

One of the most exciting aspects of the podcast is the discussion around multi-cloud strategies. The experts emphasize that healthcare organizations no longer have to be tied to a single cloud provider. Thanks to solutions from NetApp, healthcare organizations can leverage multiple cloud platforms, such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, to meet their unique needs. Whether it’s for backup, auto-tiering, or storage, these platforms provide the flexibility to craft solutions that best suit each organization’s goals.

The conversation emphasizes how cloud providers’ increasing flexibility and the availability of first-party services across these platforms are making multi-cloud adoption easier than ever.

The Future of Healthcare IT

The episode wraps up by highlighting the ongoing evolution of healthcare IT and how the pandemic has permanently changed the landscape. The need for patient engagement, the move away from on-prem data centers, and the push toward cloud and hybrid solutions are all trends that will continue to shape the industry. T-Systems’ innovative solutions, in partnership with NetApp, are making these transitions easier, more secure, and more efficient for healthcare providers.

This insightful podcast is a must-listen for anyone involved in healthcare IT, cloud solutions, or digital transformation in the healthcare space. Tune in to hear firsthand how healthcare organizations are navigating these changes and what lies ahead for the future of healthcare technology.

Interested in hearing more? Listen to the full podcast now and learn from the experts who are shaping the future of healthcare IT.

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Transcription

The following transcript was generated using Descript’s speech to text service and then further edited. As it is AI generated, YMMV.

Tech ONTAP Podcast Episode 399 – The T-Systems Health Hybrid Cloud
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Justin Parisi: This week on the Tech ONTAP Podcast, we invite Scott Charles and Brian O’Mahony to talk about how NetApp helps power the T-Systems Hybrid Health Cloud.

Podcast intro/outro: Intro

Justin Parisi: Hello and welcome to the Tech ONTAP Podcast. My name is Justin Parisi. I’m here in the basement of my house and with me today I have a couple of special guests to talk to us all about a hybrid health cloud. To do that scott Charles is here. So Scott, what do you do and how do we reach you?

Scott Charles: Hey, thank you for having us here today. My name is Scott Charles. I’m with T-Systems. My position with T-Systems is our North America CTO of our health practice, and I’m reachable at Scott.Charles, at tsystems.com.

Justin Parisi: All right. Excellent. And you can’t talk about NetApp and healthcare without talking about it with Brian O’Mahony.

So Brian, what do you do here at NetApp? I think we’ve already hinted at that. And how do we reach you?

Brian O’Mahony: Morning, Justin. Brian O’Mahony been at NetApp 15 years, been in healthcare 25 years. I am the CTO in the industry solutions group, and I’m very much focused on building solutions that we can deliver to our healthcare customers.

And you can reach me at omahony@netapp. com. That’s O M A H O N Y.

Justin Parisi: Alright, excellent. So, first let’s talk about T-Systems. I don’t know if they’re familiar with T-Systems. I know in Germany they definitely are. But here, In the States, they might not be as familiar with T-Systems, and it might even be easier to talk about what T-Systems doesn’t do, but Scott, what exactly does T-Systems do?

Scott Charles: Great question. And you’re right. In the European market T-Systems is very well known. US market, our magenta T is commonly referred to and associated with T Mobile and T Mobile is one of our sister companies. We’re under the umbrella of Deutsche Telekom in Germany. And here in the US, We are the ninth recognized brand as of last year, which is really cool as we’ve grown in our footprint with our customers. And what we are is really a public cloud enabler. We manage digitalization and transformation for our customers. And then we motivate them, to mature and modernize their environments, utilizing our cloud offerings from a service delivery perspective and infrastructure.

And we partner with our T Mobile colleagues as well to ensure we have an on site footprint and services all the way down to our data centers that sit globally around the world.

Justin Parisi: It originally was started as a telecom company, basically. Right. And now it’s migrated into that public hybrid private cloud scenario if I understand that correctly, is that right?

Scott Charles: Yeah. So that’s our Deutsche Telekom footprint. Deutsche Telekom is a telecommunications company. From that they had an IT need and they developed the T-Systems organization to support the infrastructure for Deutsche Telekom, and then that grew over time and from that growth T-Systems, both locally and globally, has grown in not just health care, but into the automotive, public sector, oil oil and gas, energies financial manufacturing markets over our last 20 plus years. Servicing customers again, regionally in the U. S. Or we got global customers that have footprints in all 16 of our data centers around the world.

Justin Parisi: Yeah. And they also act as a IT services company where they provide IT services ad hoc for larger companies that maybe don’t want to maintain that onsite.

So like I said, it’s easier to say what T-Systems doesn’t do because they have their hands in a lot of different things.

Scott Charles: Yeah, we do have our hands in a lot of things, and it’s hard to control, especially with the ever evolving technologies and customer needs. You throw that against security concerns, regulation, compliancy, and stuff, it complicates us.

One of the fundamental things that people don’t recognize with T-Systems is that because it is Deutsche Telekom, and we do sit in Germany, we have very stringent and strict requirements we have to follow for that region. And we embrace that in all of our services. So security is number one above our infrastructure and our platform as a services, anything else we do, everything is driven by security because of that underlying requirement that we have.

So. Customers benefit from us having that footprint in Germany and the relationship with Deutsche Telekom because again, we can bring security to the table that most service providers don’t have available to them because they don’t have to deal with the stringency of those markets.

Brian O’Mahony: Yeah. If you look at Europe, they lead the way when it comes to governance and compliance, things like GDPR and the rest of the world follows.

So if you guys are meeting the requirements in Europe You’re definitely doing it in other areas around the world.

Justin Parisi: Yeah, and having that experience in compliance and regulations is especially important when you’re dealing with an industry such as healthcare. Because we all know that it’s full of regulation and compliance because there’s a lot of personal identifying information that you want to keep private for people because there’s HIPAA, there’s whatever regulations they have in Germany or Europe so there’s a lot going on there. So having a company like T-Systems that understands all that is going to be crucial for having a successful healthcare hybrid cloud.

Scott Charles: Exactly.

And when you talk about hybrid cloud, we’re discussing on premise services, private cloud services, and public cloud and maintaining security through that entire stack is critical in any business, but in healthcare, especially here in the US, it’s a requirement. There’s no luxury given to security. It’s a mandate. It has to be the foremost focus when delivering and developing solutions for our health customers to ensure that privacy for the patients. And that leads to why we’re here today.

That’s the reason why We work closely with NetApp on that is because they’re the ones that ensure that what we do in our storage level for all three of those locations we’re able to maintain and improve that security for our customer as they mature.

Justin Parisi: And we’ll get into that NetApp side of things and how we do that, but let’s talk a little bit more about the Hybrid Health Cloud. Give me your overview of what that is and what T-Systems offers there.

Scott Charles: So the Hybrid Cloud was developed out of necessity. If we look at the U.S. health market, unfortunately, it’s maintained with a lot of technical debt. And COVID was a significant. negative in financial revenue for healthcare. Due to that, it was a snowball effect where they were not having the revenue they needed. And therefore the technology stack was penalized because of that.

And as they carry the technology stack, they still have to improve other elements of their technology to maintain patient services and patient care, along with the requirements and security aspects. And what we found was organizations that needed to move and mature and modernize and transform couldn’t because of the financial impacts of a significant investment into doing such an activity.

We had a lot of health customers that were looking to go to public cloud, but they couldn’t do a whole lift and shift. And at the same time they wanted to, again, reduce their technical debt. So about three years ago, we started developing this concept of the hybrid cloud. It is an industry specific cloud.

It’s on one of our standardized environments within T-Systems. And the concept is really simple. Let’s say the EHR that they use, electronic health records they want to put it in private cloud to get it off of the on premise location, because they want to do an improvement in the technology stack and expand the services. So we put the EHR within the private cloud, but they have dependencies for other clinical applications back on prem.

And by utilizing the same storage footprint and connectivity, we’re able to seamlessly interact back and forth between on prem and private cloud. But it also allows us to incorporate technologies that they didn’t have before, which is improving disaster recovery, or improving their backups, or improving auto tiering of data if it’s unstructured.

There’s a lot of different things it allows them to do because we’re using this unified storage approach. And then if that customer wants to start putting their workloads and putting their toes in the water with the public cloud, because we utilize NetApp files in the cloud, it allows us to start moving workloads to the public cloud platform as well without having to worry about Disconnects with the technology may sit in one of the hyperscalers versus what’s on prem or private cloud.

It leaves it very seamless for them. And then that allows us then to expand the things I said earlier, like disaster recovery, now we can incorporate high availability. Now we can start moving into different backup strategies and we can even expand further their unstructured data tiering by having it in multiple locations, with multiple different types of retention policies, unique to that customer.

Brian O’Mahony: Yeah, there’s alignment between T-Systems and the healthcare industry in general. A third of the world’s data is healthcare. And 90 percent of that is imaging. But there’s critical applications like EHR as well. So security is really, really important.

The world is changing. There is cyber attacks. There’s AI and the promise of AI coming. And each of those calls for an intelligent data infrastructure. It calls for moving data into different locations including the cloud. They want to get out of managing data centers and focus more on patient care. And that’s where T-Systems adds all this value in giving customers options to go in that direction and provide better patient care.

Scott Charles: Thank you, Brian. You opened up a couple of topics there that are very key to that. You mentioned AI obviously we’ve got the internet of medical devices, data and security, and, Justin, your question about some of the other fundamental reasons why we created this was not just out of necessity of what I mentioned earlier, but one of the things we also saw was that there were a lot of health organizations that when they did have an impact, to Brian’s point about ransomware attack, their entire technology was offline.

And though they can go to the paper methodology to maintain patient care, it does have an effect, right? Patient care slows down. Now if a hospital room, an emergency room gets capacity and you’re doing the paper methodology, now things are backed up if you have another patient coming in or where do you move that patient to and how you move a patient through the actual health organization itself. So we wanted to come up with a concept that When we developed this environment, regardless of which footprint was in between the on prem, private and public, that there was always full functionality and full availability of the ecosystem for healthcare. Now, they may have reduced capacities for end users but the whole idea behind it too, was to ensure that no matter what was the impact to the health care organization from an IT perspective, we were able to maintain the functionality of the EHRs and ancillary applications for clinical support, along with having availability to it. So that was a key driver to make sure that again, IT health organizations were always online, and that snowball effect of going offline and potentially impacting patient care was removed as much as possible.

Brian O’Mahony: One of the biggest reasons for choosing NetApp would be our security capabilities. If you look at healthcare, they’re not the most attacked industry, but attacks have the biggest impact in taking them out for months. And our ability to guarantee that you can recover from any attack is significant, but more importantly we have AI driven monitoring real time on your primary system. And NetApp is the only vendor that does that. That has the biggest impact on availability. If you’re paying a ransom and you’re recovering, you’ve already been down for a month.

But within seconds if you can detect an attack, And take a snapshot and send an alert and do a quick recovery and keep your systems online, that’s probably one of the biggest things that NetApp offers.

Scott Charles: And you take that now and amplify that. So we’re looking at it in the scope of security and ransomware attacks, creating a downtime.

There’s other downtimes in healthcare IT. Simple patching of systems takes operations offline. So if you incorporate a methodology, which is what the health hybrid cloud does it allows an organization to take a segment of their environment down, patch it, but back to that other side that’s still providing the availability and functionality of the app stack.

Again, maybe a reduced capacity end users, but there’s no outage to the services being delivered. So we take that same methodology of applying it from the security aspects that NetApp brings to the table, along with our security aspects from T-Systems. And then we say, okay, what’s the next benefit we can bring out of it?

And then, simple patching, or you can go back to the CrowdStrike incident that happened last year. We can revert back in time before that patch came out. And put a company, an organization, back in operations, which is exactly what we did. And though we had health organizations that were impacted by the CrowdStrike problem, They weren’t down like other organizations because we were able to use the net of technology to roll back in time and bring them back operational without having an impact on the data that they were utilizing.

Brian O’Mahony: Yes, Scott, you’re touching on one of the big reasons why healthcare organizations want to move into the cloud in general or move out of the data center. The pains of patching, typically that’s done quarterly. But also upgrading and migrating onto a new system. That’s all disruptive. For an EHR system, that is an 18-1 project. You’re just deployed it three years ago and right in the middle, you’re planning your next upgrade. So having those pains and management go away is a huge service that you guys offer.

Scott Charles: Thank you, Brian. Exactly. And that’s what we wanted to bring the light and our health services and our offerings here in North America and globally is that though we may not be in the same breath as other organizations like Azure and AWS and Google. What we bring to the table in that environment that’s unique to those situations that they don’t have.

Right. And, To your point, that’s the ability we have as an organization matures and modernizes and starts to wean off their technical debt and move towards their objectives, regardless if it’s just to get out of the data center and that’s it, or get out of the data center and start putting a footprint in public cloud, it allows us to massage what they do, Consult with them and make recommendations and support those recommendations to mature them into those steps and allow them to do things, like you said, the upgrades, I mean, doing an upgrade from on prem to private or public cloud is very possible in this environment because it doesn’t matter to the end user, where it’s at. As long as we do the proper analysis with the customer, explain to them that, Hey, look, if you do this, you may see this potential impact, or you won’t see this potential impact.

And the customer has to make a decision if that’s an impact they want to take. And maybe a slight latency in how an end user accesses something, if they put everything in public cloud, for example, and we’re like, Hey. That’s not a recommendation we would make. Here’s the alternative. And again, it’s the customer’s choice how they run their business, but we’re giving them the flexibility of something they never had before, which is, okay, I don’t have to lift and shift everything to public cloud.

If I want to get out of the data center, I can do what I can to public cloud and put stuff in private cloud and my end users will not know at all where it’s at. And they won’t feel the impact of moving out of my data center. And I get the flexibility. I’m now maturing to that kind of always on scenario having the flexibility to do my patching without impact, or doing software upgrades, or as you said, EHR upgrades and stuff. They have that capability they never had before because now they got resources they can use without having to buy the resources if there on prem to mature out.

Justin Parisi: Another benefit of this is when you have a satellite office that maybe doesn’t have access do IT services or to manage it themselves, they have to connect to a separate data center that might be very far away from them. When you use something like a cloud implementation, you’re able to localize that a bit better and get better overall latency and performance when you’re trying to access those data sets.

Scott Charles: Yeah, so that’s where the Magenta T, as we call it, comes into play, right?

So we as T-Systems don’t do telecommunications activities. We’re a service provider and delivery organization. With our partnerships with T Mobile we’re able to implement 5G connectivity at a remote location, and we can use that 5G connectivity to come back to our data center.

Or that’s where we go up the stack even further to our relationship with Deutsche Telekom, where we start implementing things like software defined WANs, allowing a remote office or clinical facility to not have to go back to, you know, the primary location and come over. They can come directly into the environment through us.

And that does reduce latency for the end users, it does improve what they’re doing, but that’s where the whole thing explodes, so to speak which was an outcome of COVID. A lot of health organizations started using IoT devices in the field prior to COVID, but during COVID, that became a significant footprint for healthcare organizations.

And that became a challenge for them, is My data sets here, I got data sets over here, and I’ve got devices out in the community servicing my patients. And that’s where we take that whole stack of Deutsche Telekom, T System, T Mobile, and put it all together for a customer and say, Look, we can put your medical IoT devices that are in the field on 5G, it can connect back to a certain location.

If that regional location or small footprint location needs to connect back into the infrastructure, we’ve got that connectivity through our Deutsche Telekom relationships. And it allows us to make it, again, that continuity for our customer to service a patient, regardless of where that patient’s at, without having an impact of either the pain point of going back to an on prem facility that may not be properly prepared for that connectivity or it allows them to not have the impact of being remote and having connectivity issues and stuff and again, snowballing that response time, which ultimately, over time, impacts patient care delivery.

Brian O’Mahony: When you look at the connectivity piece that these systems offer, and marry that with NetApp’s ability to make data available, edge core cloud, data mobility, unlock silos. Silos is One of the biggest costs and inefficiencies in healthcare. 25 percent of healthcare spend is wasted on silos and inefficiencies. So the combination of T-Systems’ connectivity, and NetApp’s ability to move data has a huge impact in reducing costs for healthcare.

Scott Charles: Yeah, that’s a killer in healthcare. And I mean, we can single it down to just unstructured data, right? So unfortunately for healthcare, they buy storage for their unstructured data.

And over the years, and I’m talking years, decades, multiple decades, That just continues to grow. It’s very inefficient because they have to have performance. They bought performance based storage to maintain operations. They just kept expanding the capacity to retain data. And that’s unfortunately not a good spend for them, right?

And at the same time, if you start looking at the impacts of that, well, a lot of these applications that healthcare utilizes, either in EHR or the ancillary applications, require some kind of access into unstructured data. And so if you decide to take that up a level and say, hey, I want to put my application A into disaster recovery, but it won’t function properly without that unstructured data.

Now you’ve got this problem with this unstructured data and it’s such a huge bucket now that you really can’t put in disaster recovery. When we designed this with a full partnership with NetApp is that, we can do that auto tiering, right? We can say, look, on prem, if that’s where you want to have your data that you want to have localized to you and quick and always ready, and in your disaster recovery scope, let’s put it here.

How long do you want that data to be, right? The age of it. You want it to be 90 days? Great. 90 days it is. Anything over 90 days moves to private cloud to another tier that’s less expensive. And it sits there, and it continues to just automatically do that kind of maturity over time. And if you say, hey, I got to keep these records. A lot of organizations have records, especially with patients that are under 18 they have to maintain those records for life.

That’s just their policy they have. Well, you want to take that data to the next level. 20 years, I want that data to go somewhere else. I got to retain it, but I don’t want to be paying for expensive storage, that’s the next tier. And then you can take it to where it’s archived now and it’s still available, but it’s sitting out here on public cloud storage now.

And the advantages of what NetApp has to bring to the table and what we wanted to do, just married right up. Because, again, we were able to see from a service provider perspective the pain points that customers have in health as far as their spend, and we understand why that’s there.

And so, again, using the Health Hybrid Cloud, that was the opportunity for us to allow that customer, again, to mature what they have without impacting negatively any type of their health delivery. Actually improving their health delivery, because now that things that they couldn’t put in disaster recovery, for example. They can because the footprint of the dependencies has been reduced. lot of them have the flexibility now to always have that insurance if they want to have disaster recovery.

Brian O’Mahony: Another thing I wanted to touch on too is, with the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare in 2013, where everything had to be digitized, it didn’t really play out, right? People became data entry clerks providers in that space. And there’s a massive burnout, pajama time. Like after a hard day’s work or they’re typing in, or if you go to see your doctor, he’s standing there with a laptop with his face on a laptop, typing all the time, that doctor patient relationship was impacted and the benefits of collecting that data never really played out.

We didn’t really see it. With the explosion of AI now, we’re seeing EHR systems partner with cloud vendors, like Epic has partnered with Microsoft, to improve that situation where The data entry, you can record a session with your doctor. It can predict symptoms. It can diagnose, it can fill in prescriptions.

It can automate that whole process. For one, it will improve the data quality that’s captured. So you can benefit from things like AI solve the burnout problem and improve the relationship between the doctor and the patient. Huge potential, very exciting. I think this year we’re going to see a lot of good things in healthcare and underneath all of that, the core to make all that happen is data. The ability to unlock silos and move data into the right place so that you can benefit from it.

Scott Charles: Yeah. And to that point, that’s where we kind of changed our focus. That’s one of the exact discussions that ATT-Systems and NetApp had.

I mean, primarily Brian and myself and my counterpart Tom Cody. Originally, this was called the healthcare hybrid cloud, and we changed it to health hybrid cloud for a reason. And to Brian’s point about AI is we have a lot of healthcare organizations that also are health insurance providers.

And so that brought the payer space in, and that data is exploding as well. And they were having the challenges of I have to have this data. I need this data. I don’t know what to do with this data. And so we said, look, our focus is going to change now from healthcare to health as a whole. And we said, we’ll have to focus on healthcare payers for insurance and life sciences.

And because we saw that maturity of the data that wasn’t there, right? Look at an adult, so to speak, and you say that’s a mature adult, but they may not be. And the data wasn’t the same footprint with health organizations. They had a lot of data that looked matured on the surface, but behind the scenes, there was no maturity to it.

And so allowing NetApp technologies with our T-Systems services to come in, do that analysis of the data and look at, first off, the security of the data. That’s the first and foremost. I can’t say enough how many times we’ve done the analysis with the tools from NetApp for our customers on structured data and found things that they probably didn’t want to see, but it’s the reality of where they’re at.

So that’s the first thing, fix your vulnerabilities, fix your security posture, and improve that. Once that’s in place, now what do you do with the data? Let’s tier it out. And let’s get it into some kind of AI footprint, to start doing an analysis of it. I don’t know how many health organizations we walk into, and, we’ll find a spreadsheet, for example.

It doesn’t sound like much, but if you find 600 copies of the same spreadsheet within the organization, that’s a problem, and it’s a wasted spin for them. Now, that’s just one spreadsheet with multiple copies, but what if that’s 200 spreadsheets, and each one of them has a few hundred copies, or if that’s an image file from a 3D imaging system, and it’s been exported out, those things are significant in size footprint, and there’s 40 copies of that for some reason, right?

And again, just looking at unstructured data, it helps an organization, mature where they’re at, have control over the data, understand the data they have, and secure that data. And then ultimately that reduces their spend. And then if you take that up to the next level of their app space? Brian and I see it all the time between SQL and Oracle databases, or even you want to use the Epic environment.

The Epic environment’s how the capacity footprint in some deployments is probably, 10, 12 times more than what it should be because they’re not using the proper technologies to maximize the capacity and utilize the storage in a means that benefits the organization from a spend perspective, but also from a compliance and control and security perspective.

Justin Parisi: Scott has mentioned a couple tools and he hasn’t mentioned him by name and I’m guessing because he doesn’t care. He just wants to use him, right? But from our perspective give me the end to end of NetApp workflow where we identify the problems and then we fix the problems with certain NetApp features and functionalities.

Brian O’Mahony: ONTAP, we’ve got to start there, right? That’s our core platform. People talk about simple NAS or simple SAN. And then when you have to actually solve a problem for a business, it becomes extremely complicated if it’s not built in. So all of the security things we talked about today, things like AI, having multi protocol access, hybrid multi cloud capability, the most secure operating system in the world… having all those tools built in it simplifies because now you’ve got a single set of tools that you can manage your data anywhere and enable things like AI and be rest assured that we can restore your data.

We can detect ransomware when it happens and keep your data online. So there’s a lot built in there. But I think the key thing is The intelligence data infrastructure. You cannot protect your data from ransomware without intelligence. You can’t do AI without intelligence. So, we have tools like BlueXP Classification and Cloud Insight, where it can show you where all of your important data is.

And, Scott talked about protecting your data. If you don’t know where your data is you can’t protect it. Your data scientists can’t find the data they need to build models. There’s so much capabilities built into those tools to simplify advancements.

Scott Charles: Yeah, the BlueXP data classification tool is a primary tool in our toolbox.

When we go in and issue the customer. The first thing we recommend them to do is what we refer to as a clinical cloud assessment. And what that basically is going to do is map out their infrastructure for them. And then it’s also going to map out the conversations that the applications are having between each other and on the infrastructure itself.

And as part of that assessment, we utilize the data classification tool set to help bring visibility into especially their unstructured data. That tool has saved customers. Because they didn’t have an understanding of what they truly had, nor did we. We walked in and saw it for the first time with them.

And when you produce the output from data classification, especially in healthcare, with the different templates it has specific for, let’s say for HIPAA it is amazing the output that product will bring, and it makes it very clean for a customer to make changes to ensure that the data is within compliance because the tool doesn’t lie.

It shows you exactly what’s going on, what’s available, what’s vulnerable. And it’s eye opening for organizations, but it gives them something other than an assumption to actually work off of. And that really helps especially CIOs and CISOs because They have data now to go to their upper management and say, I need to make these changes to our organization.

Here are the reasons why. And yeah, that tool is just incredible from the front end perspective. But then we go all the way through the stack, like Brian said, utilizing ONTAP also using StorageGRID. And then we also go back on the other side. We move away from traditional backups within this environment and we utilize the NetApp BlueXP backup and recovery technology.

Why not? It’s integrated with the NetApp storage. It makes things seamless and it helps us control for a customer how their data backups are done and how the recovery can be done besides what’s available on ONTAP from a backup and recovery perspective. So we utilize The NetApp product line from initiation and consulting perspective all the way through the full operations and recovery of an organization.

Brian O’Mahony: Yeah, you need tools, you need intelligence to do things like governance and compliance, which is critical in the healthcare space. Tools that pull in your directory services, walk your file systems for security, actually watch who’s doing what, where, and then once that data is collected, apply intelligence to it, real time monitoring for ransomware protection, but also things like exfiltration of data. You know, Scott has a bad week and comes in and starts pulling data from places he shouldn’t be. Well, that will raise a red flag. So that level is needed for ransomware protection and compliance and governance. You need compliance and governance to do AI. ONTAP is that platform that enables all that.

And the fact that it’s on one set of tools there’s a tremendous lack of resources within healthcare. They don’t have a lot of margin and money to spend, and that is challenging. So simplicity is really important. We can provide a single set of tools to be able to manage that environment.

Scott Charles: Yeah, and you said something as you entered Brian, that resonates with our customers. And this is unfortunate in the market. T-Systems used to do this, go in with one tool, do an analysis, and then when you moved to operations, it was a different tool. And we can go back to BlueXP data classification.

We use that for the analysis and most often than not, the customer retains that for their governance because it’s the watchdog. It identified the problems and it stays in place and continues on. And that’s good for a customer because they got familiar with it. They understood what the power of the tool was, and then they can see it in their day to day operations.

And they’re able to just seamlessly incorporate that into their governance and allows them to maintain consistent operations from a regulatory and compliance perspective, along with maintaining day to day operations from an IT delivery perspective. So they actually are both benefited those tracks by once the tool is used for analysis, consultative work, and then into day to day operations.

Justin Parisi: All ONTAP needs now is something that can ask you how your week’s going so it can figure out if you’re going to steal data or not.

Brian O’Mahony: It’s in the roadmap…

Justin Parisi: . So, earlier you were mentioning COVID and the whole How it spawned this hybrid cloud approach. Now that people are returning to work and companies are requiring return to work, is that impacting how T-Systems approaches this healthcare solution, or do they see the benefit and the value in it as it is, and it’s going to be here to stay?

Scott Charles: We took that in consideration. There was a potential for health organizations to go back to the office, so to speak. And some have, and some haven’t. Some have seen the benefit of staying remote, the efficiencies of that, and obviously on the bottom line numbers as well.

The beauty part of what we offer from the Health Hybrid Cloud is it doesn’t really matter to us, right? So We can offer to where if they’re going back to the office, great. That campus footprint connects into the environment, whatever the end solution was for the customer and they go on with their day to day operations as is.

If they’re going to stay more 60/40 or 60 percent of their back office staff is going to be still home based, We can have that just like a regional clinic location. It’s remote. We can have those users come directly into the environment, into private cloud or directly into the public cloud and as if they were still on premise. To us, nothing really changed for our actual delivery methodologies for a customer. What may change is the connectivity methodologies for a customer. And again, it goes back to if a customer wants to slowly move into public cloud and their objective is to get out of their data center business, but they also want to maintain a footprint of remote workers.

That’s part of the analysis we do in the solutioning to show, again, where best sits the applications and the connectivity for that scenario. If they say, look, we’re going to do the same scenario, but we’re going to start moving from home based users, move back to the office. We’ll take that into consideration in the solutioning so that once they do go back on premise there is not a stranded cost of investment of any type for them in the solutioning that they’re stuck with because they don’t have remote users.

So we take all that into consideration as we design out their strategy and their objectives, they’re trying to accomplish, if it’s in a year, three year, five year, seven year methodology we take that into consideration as part of their maturity path.

Brian O’Mahony: Just to add to that too, just a different spin on it, is the patients themselves, right? COVID, obviously, we had to adjust how you provide care remotely now. Keeping people out of hospital is a good way of keeping people healthy because of things like sepsis and other things. So I think there’s a knock on effect for that on how we deliver remote care. Have you seen a lot on that too.

Scott Charles: That was probably the biggest explosion we saw. It was those medical IoT devices, and the nursing staff that was remote, that stayed out of the hospital, so to speak, not the clinics. They were going to patients homes and stuff. And we saw more and more devices that you typically wouldn’t have thought would move out of the hospitals and clinics, moving into patients homes because they could monitor it there. But the flip side, I think the biggest positive we saw trying to make a positive out of COVID, as negative as it was, is that the technology for a patient to be able to engage with a healthcare provider improved dramatically. Now, patients don’t feel. inconvenienced to have to go to the doctor’s office or the clinic itself. They can do it via their phone or their iPad, their computer at home. The technology on the back end had to be there to support that. And that has matured tremendously. I mean, it was already there, but the growth was forced because of COVID.

And the beauty part is healthcare has not relaxed on that. They are actually trying to find more means to engage with the patient. To your point, a patient that engaged earlier is going to be a healthier patient than one who’s reluctant to go to see their doctor, go to the clinic, or even the emergency room. We see that technology changing and being embraced by health delivery organizations. And we are constantly looking at ways we can help improve that and expand that without having to have the, exorbitant costs that may be associated with that for health organization.

Justin Parisi: Yeah, there used to be a reluctance for healthcare to go into the cloud because of the concerns of security. But I think part of it is the need to do it because of COVID, but also because they’re realizing that even if you’re on prem, you’re still exposed, right? So why even bother with trying to manage your own data center? Maybe even more exposed because you don’t have the expertise to secure your environment the way someone in the public cloud might.

Scott Charles: Yeah, and that goes back to technical debt as well. In healthcare, unfortunately, when it comes to IT staffing, the ratio is not favorable for what they deliver. And there’s a lot of workload and stress that’s put on IT staff to deliver within healthcare.

And it is in human nature, things slip through the cracks. And it’s one of the industries that slipping through the crack. Yeah, it can be expensive, but it’s a patient, right? I have this kind of thing with our organization because again, as I mentioned earlier, we, we’re in multiple different verticals and we have customers that produce gasoline and oil.

We have customers that produce adult beverages and though they’re important to the world, I can go without a gallon of gasoline. I can go without a six pack, but when it comes to health, I kind of want to keep my finger if something happens to it and that’s where people say, well, that’s just doctor work and nurses and clinics, but the IT infrastructure dependency within those three markets examples is significant these days.

And in healthcare, it’s more relevant. And it’s one of those things that as organizations grow they want to move out of the data center, and they don’t want to get rid of the IT staff. That’s not the principle.

The principle is that, to make things better for their IT staff. So those cracks and those what if moments for us being humans does happen. It is reduced and as T-Systems, when we designed this, we wanted to simplify our delivery methodologies for that same reason.

That’s the reason why we went with NetApp across the board, on prem, private and public. It’s the single pane of glass for my storage delivery team. It doesn’t matter to the end user or the patient where the application, what they’re seeing on the device is coming from, as long as it’s functioning.

From my delivery side, we wanted the same thing, and it shouldn’t matter to my storage team where that data’s at. They’re seeing the same thing. So, the whole idea was to simplify both from a delivery perspective and the recipient using the technologies to shrink that human error potential, and relieve the stress and the bottlenecks that happen within health IT.

Brian O’Mahony: Just to back up what you said, in healthcare, the trend is moving out of the data center. We’ve seen it over the last five years, vast majority of people, rather than deploying on prem, are deploying outside of their data center. And for lots of different reasons it’s difficult and they don’t have the resources to manage their data.

But if I can move infrastructure out of my data center, focus on patient care, at the same time reduce cost and get better services that you would get from T-Systems. It’s a very attractive and very popular move lately. We’re seeing it. It’s happening.

Scott Charles: Yeah. That’s the driver. That’s the base concept of the health hybrid cloud is to allow a customer to be able to make that move. Again, there are some customers in health that just say, okay, fine, I’m just going do it and just do the huge cut over to public cloud. We’ve got customers that have done that.

And now they’re like, that was not such a great idea for my organization. And now they’re trying to back out, but they don’t have an on prem data center anymore. So now they’re stuck in this. What do I do scenario? And that’s where, We take that concept and say, look, you want to move out of the data center.

You don’t want to, or can’t fully yet go to public cloud. You want to mature there. And that’s where, when we designed this, we implemented what we’re known For over two decades, which is our private cloud services, and that allows a customer to make those steps as the organization allows with focusing on patient care.

If we need to move a workload because it’s ready from on prem and take it straight to public cloud, it can be done without impacting patient care. And they don’t have to worry about that now. Whereas if it’s on prem, their IT staff would have to stop maintaining day to day operations, focus on this problem.

Test it, move through, validate it, and then support it after the fact, well, now you’ve got a disconnect in day to day operations that could potentially have an impact on patient care. So, yeah, that’s a valid point, and again, there are so many concepts and scenarios and benefits that we drove towards and continue to solution towards around the health hybrid cloud for that exact reason.

I mean, NetApp comes to us and says, Hey, we’re seeing this trend. We have customer conversation. We see the market trends. We see the software trends. And we take all that and do that full analysis to see what we need to adjust or how we can change the conversation with a customer to benefit them on what their objectives is. Because the one thing in health is no one is the same as the guy next door doing health. None of them are even close to being identical. The concepts are there, but how they deliver is uniquely to them. And that’s where we wanted to have yet standardization and frameworks and methodologies, but the flexibility as well. One of the things that T-Systems is known for sometimes good, sometimes bad, is we are hard on standardization. It’s sometimes, Considered a little rigid on that. And again, it goes back to our roots being out of Germany, but we also recognize when we developed this environment, we had to have flexibility because of the technical debt health care carries. Unfortunately, there are health care organizations are still running, for example, Windows server operating systems that are no longer under support. That’s an opening for vulnerabilities. And between the NetApp storage isolation we can do and security features there, plus what we do within our infrastructure from a security perspective, we’re able to still deliver that, protect that, as if it was getting patched, because we surround it with different levels of security.

But we do that in a means that doesn’t negatively impact the delivery of that data or that application. So again, patient care is not impacted negatively.

Justin Parisi: We’ve talked about the cloud approach and we’ve talked about putting NetApp files into the cloud. Now the cloud isn’t just this one big analogous mass, right?

There’s multiple clouds. So are we talking a single cloud provider? Are we talking multiple cloud providers? And if so, how do you navigate that?

Scott Charles: With the health hybrid cloud, obviously the hybrid cloud part, right? So we’ll just take that as on prem, private, and public.

And when we get to public, it’s multi cloud. Because of the relationship and the services that NetApp has put into Azure, AWS, and Google, I don’t want to say we don’t care from T-Systems, because we really do care. But if a customer has Azure, we can do the same thing. If they have AWS, we can do the same thing.

If they have AWS and Azure, we can do the same thing. So, to us, it’s what the customer has existing or where they care to go to. That’s where we’ll solution it around. But because of the NetApp technologies in the public cloud, It’s really seamless to us to develop the solution for the customer, to utilize what they currently have or their desires to go to.

Justin Parisi: And are you using more of the virtualized ONTAP in the cloud? So like your FSxNs, or are you using The as a service model, like the Azure NetApp Files or the Cloud Volume Services or the Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, or is it a blend?

Scott Charles: All of the above. It goes back to the services are available, and they’re NetApp services, and it’s what’s best for the customer. So again, depending on what they’re trying to accomplish and what the long term goals are, it may be a mix of FSxN and NetApp Files. It could be a mix, it could be a blend. Again, it goes back to what are we trying to accomplish first?

And if we go and look at the backup methodology versus auto tiering methodologies, the outcome in public cloud could be different for each one of those to accomplish the goals and objectives.

Brian O’Mahony: It goes back to flexibility. So wherever the customer are in their journey in moving to the cloud and building out their infrastructure, you have the options with NetApp.

We have this single platform, single set of tools that you can deploy on prem in a private cloud. And they’re available as first party services in each one of the major clouds. And it doesn’t matter where the customer is. T-Systems can deliver on each one of those cases, or all of the above.

Justin Parisi: NetApp plus T-Systems equals good. So Scott if we wanted to reach you again, how do we do that?

Scott Charles: Yeah, sure. My email address is scott, S C O T T, period, Charles, C H A R L E S at T-Systems.com.

Justin Parisi: And Brian?

Brian O’Mahony: Yeah, you can reach me at O [email protected].

That’s [email protected].

Justin Parisi: Alright, excellent. Thanks so much for joining us today and talking to us all about hybrid health in the cloud.

Alright, that music tells me it’s time to go! If you’d like to get in touch with us, send us an email to [email protected] or send us a tweet @netapp. As always, if you’d like to subscribe, find us on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, stitcher, or via techontappodcast. com. If you liked the show today, leave us a review. On behalf of the entire Tech ONTAP Podcast team, I’d like to thank Brian O’Mahony and Scott Charles for joining us today. As always, thanks for listening.

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