On May 21, Verizon Enterprise Solutions announced a wide-reaching expansion of its healthcare networking services. The new offerings include five new data centers located across the United States, for a total of seven, and several new cloud and infrastructure services. All the services are designed to help the healthcare industry meet HIPAA requirements for safeguarding data.
Chris Davis
According to Verizon senior solutions architect Chris Davis, the data centers provide three options for customers: colocation, where customers bring their own hardware to a data center; managed services, where Verizon provides dedicated hardware and manages it for the customer; and the cloud, where it provides shared, scalable hardware on a virtualized platform.
Davis notes that all the data centers are also “major peering centers,” which means that customers will be no more than two “hops” away on the Internet. This fact, he says, “is hugely advantageous for applications that require low-latency, real-time networking such as telemedicine.”
In addition to the expanded number of data centers, Verizon is offering several new cloud services, including backup, recovery, intrusion detection and prevention, and log aggregation. According to Davis, “the hardest part in healthcare moving to the cloud is understanding how their IT delivery models will change when they move.”
Previously, transitioning to the cloud meant that healthcare providers would need to “to re-evaluate their intrusion-detection strategy, their log aggregation strategy, and find the right tools that operate on the cloud.” The new services, Davis says, allow providers to “simply plug their applications and their different instances into that service without having to worry about having to identify new technology, deploying it, and managing it.”
Read more details on the Verizon website.
