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Thanks for joining us. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital. And creator of this week health, a set of channels, dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged. Welcome to our digital infrastructure to support the evolving care delivery model briefing campaign. This is being done in partnership with VMware, and I'm excited to get to our topic today. Multi-cloud, we're joined by Cameron Luellen, director healthcare ISVs and Alliance partners at. This podcast series is gonna culminate with an excellent webinar panel discussion. We're gonna have experts talking about enterprise cloud, cloud, native workforce, and the ecosystem that brings that all together. That's gonna be on Thursday, October 13th from one to 2:00 PM Eastern time. you can check it out on our website this week called.com top right hand corner, or check out more information in the description box below. And, you know, we wanna thank our sponsor once again, VMware for making this content possible possible and, and giving us the opportunity to deliver on our mission, to develop the next generation of health leaders now onto 📍 today's show.

all right. We're joined by Cameron Luwellen director for healthcare ISVs and Alliance partners at VMware. And today we're gonna talk multicloud, Cameron, welcome back to the show. Glad to be back. Thanks. We're flying through these, this is our fourth session, and we're gonna end all this with a webinar at the end. And as I talked about in the intro you can find information about that. This one is near and dear to my heart.

we used to talk about the fact that healthcare was reticent to move to the cloud because of security and compliance and any number of other reasons what's changed to drive this increased level of adoption of the cloud in healthcare. Sure.

Well, of course legacy infrastructure, right? The aging infrastructure and the existing data center is, has led to a lot of high cost people wanna get outta the data centers, the expensive high availability and disaster recovery. Co-locations the threat, right? Obviously you're, you're more likely to be hacked at your health system than you are your house.

And so the pressure to, to be able to share data as a result, The pandemic there it is Phil. While at risk of potential fines has accelerated that as well. Then, of course along with the great resignation and different adaptations within the cloud infrastructure, we'll, we're seeing challenges right around being able to hire the correct professionals to, to keep the environment to the level that you are accustomed to, but also to start being able to have the ability to manage all these different platforms to go where you really like to go.

I think it's leapfrogging. I mean, essentially you went from what you had in your data center to the cloud. And I remember when my team came in and said, Hey, bill, check this out. And they, they put a Amazon echo on my, on my table and they said, Hey, just, just say this phrase to it. And so I said, Hey, echo provision five.

And we had like four different images. And so I said five image, one servers. In our data center. And then they showed me on the screen where it was provisioning those servers. And I tell that story that didn't be, we didn't make that production. Right? Sure. So, so nobody, nobody get all upset about that.

But at the end of the day, what that showed is the level of automation that was available, the, the software defined architecture, if you will, that now gave us a level. I mean, the level of agility that we had at that point, it used to be all right, well, let's call our hardware vendor. Let's get 'em in we get it in.

Do we have enough PDs in the data center? Do we have enough of this? Do we have enough of that? And, and the, the, the paradigm just changed dramatically. And this changed prior to the pandemic, the adoption, I think curve happened during the pandemic. I, I think the question I have for you is why not one cloud, we're gonna talk about multi-cloud today and why not? Why not? Just one cloud what's happening to drive multiple clouds for health systems.

You, you kind of alluded to it in your, in your example, right? That echo is going to be based on a certain protocol and technology that may align to a specific cloud. Right? Everyone remembers how locked in.

We used to be with a certain wonderful partner of ours that we, that we loved. But if you were going to do something that was in a spreadsheet or a document, right, they would kind of get you with a sort of buy one, get one free mentality that locked you in the, the same potential actually exists. If you were to get locked into some one native cloud, right. What VMware does by sort of serving things up. And this experience that you users are, are used to using gives you a certain amount of portability, right? It gives you access to the data. It allows you though to also use different clouds for different reasons.

So you're not locked into one particular cost, one particular model. And then ultimately our cloud strategy. is just Based around looking at healthcare's key requirements, right. We wanna make sure that we empower connected care. We wanna accelerate that cloud native digital patient experience, but in modernizing sort of H I T we're looking at that more as cloud transformation.

And that means that specifically, we want to not do the thing that has led to so many other let's call them unfortunate sticky situations where in order to extract yourself out of a, a relationship with a partner, you wound up having to move heaven and earth financially.

Yeah. So lock in, in fact, early on, people were asking me what's the, what's the biggest risk for for moving to the cloud. And I said vendor lock in. I think if we don't think through the architecture ahead of time and layer the technologies, we're going to end up going onto a cloud native environment. And then when it comes time to swap that out and move somewhere else, we're not gonna be able to do that.

That was one of the that was just one of the one of the primary things. And by the way, my Amazon example, Amazon echo, we were actually provisioning through VMware, just so .

Well, thank you. Thank you. I figured it's interesting too, just if you don't examine that cloud infrastructure and management and what kind of access you've got that goes along with a previous episode when we talked about architecting things, the right way with the security posture that you're, you're eventually gonna require. But, but we can get there.

Yeah. vendor lock in is one. And then the other, the other issue, obvious you're moving from that data center, that's right down the hall or in the hospital and that kind of stuff. And people are like, all right, we're moving to the cloud. How can we ensure that we're going to be able to have a certain level of continuity? And one of the things we were able to show them with the right architecture. And, and again, we had VMware on our multi-cloud environment, we were able to fail over from cloud to cloud and those kind of things. So we were able segment our architecture, unlike anything we had done before when we had the physical data center and we were able to fail over from cloud to cloud and the clouds weren't necessarily compatible, but the, the layering of the technology, putting the VMware multi-cloud layer on top of that, we were able to, to fail certain workloads and components over from these various disparate clouds it was.

And actually it was fairly seamless. And that's the I think that's the promise of the cloud with the right architecture and the right layers underneath it.

I couldn't agree more. I think that multi-cloud really spans the entire it life cycle. Right? So you were talking about infrastructure and whether or not it's a, a private cloud, a public cloud you're on the edge or manage cloud. We want to connect that along with everything that you're doing with applications, once we talked about in a previous episode, in terms of modernizing those from a traditional standpoint, what your DevOps team's really asking, are you moving cloud data over to the way that we look at the services around that cloud and we are trying to include machine learning and AI and data services.

And then of course, that relates back to the management and operation of those. And so we're trying to make it so that you are automating those things and that the application life is something that's, that's in line with no different than updating windows. I mean, to that degree, actually, one of the biggest things that we didn't really talk about too.

So I'm kind of throwing you a curve ball is the announcement of project Ary. Where we essentially took our vRealize operations automation, and we combined that with cloud health. So that now we have an offering that we feel is sort of first in class, in terms of being able to control the cloud, spend, manage your risk maximize your efficiency. And of course accelerate the agility.

So talk to me about cloud spend. This is one of the things I'm hearing more and more from health system leaders is they really have to keep a, a close eye on this. They're worried about the, the you, you can scale this stuff up very rapidly, so you can end up with an awful lot of storage that you didn't know you were utilizing.

You can end up with a lot more compute. You can end up with sprawl that you didn't didn't recognize or didn't realize that was, that was going on. How do we manage that? Spend that cloud spend are there a certain set of tools that help health systems get ahead of this? .

Yeah. So it's funny, my son I got a chance to take him for the first time to photo at a chow. And it blew his mind because of the fact that you you just flip over your card and if it's red, no more meat. If it's green, keep going.

I love that place.

Well, he, he, he kept it going green bill. And so he, he got full, faster than he realized. And I use that as an analogy for the way that, that you can figure out workloads and start throwing 'em up in the cloud and not realize really how much you're spending.

Right. We found that 73% of healthcare executives are looking to improve consistency across all of their public cloud environments. And so. To that end. Right. What I was talking about with, with aria, you could really start to drive financial accountability with the management of the operation of those capabilities and, and sort of analyzing the cloud and the cloud cost.

And also most importantly, the capacity trend. So you're, you can line things up to be used. You can line them up to cost centers. And if one we're starting to accelerate too far, obviously you could set up a notification that goes back to the automation so that you're not getting a sort of sticker shock bill.

Right. Which I think a lot of people got when they realized that ingress and egress was something that people could get charged for in different ways.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I mean, I just go back to the original point, somebody might be saying, Hey, why, why would I use VMware in this environment? Why would I layer VMware in there? And I think it is that agility we're coming back to that agility, that architecture, that common framework to administer that a common DevOps framework as well for your team. I'm doing the we've switched roles at this point. I'm talking about all the things that I appreciated about it, but I think that is the, that is the answer to why layer that in and why not just go, Hey, I'm just gonna drop this stuff on this provider's cloud and this stuff on this provider's cloud. Because it does give you that ability to, it gives you flexibility, agility to make the decisions you need for that are best for your organization.

Yeah. And, I think that's, it's really important to kind of realize that with the advance of a whole bunch of different flavors of, of cloud, if you will.

Right. That's the same thing as we kind of saw in Android and operating systems and the way that people had different operating systems that now they were trying to figure out how to bring in house. Well with VMware and you kind of layering us in to, to say, right, we wanna look at that and be able to make sure that whether or not we're using sort of a cloud assembler or a service broker or something like code stream, We wanna put all of these things together in an orchestrated method so that now the automation is connected to your operation and it's familiar, right?

I can't keep stressing this enough. Once you start to get into some of these different clouds, you're gonna see that they are using different tools that require different tool set. And so if you don't have someone that's operating in that or familiar, then you wind up sort of spinning yourself in cycles that you're ultimately gonna have to undo the familiarity with VMware, the consistency, the no it works is what helps to make sure that your cloud obviously stays secure, but their applications are integrated. And then ultimately that you have the transparency that you want in terms of logs, et cetera. So that it's running to your level of expectation.

Cameron has always fantastic conversation. Next time we get together, we're gonna talk about some of those ISVs and partners you work with and how we bring all this together and deliver it for healthcare. Again, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it, Cameron.

Thanks bill. 📍 A pleasure.

what a great discussion, love talking to Cameron fantastic insights into the industry and what's going on. I wanna thank our sponsor for today. VMware, for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Don't forget that this whole series of podcast ends with a great webinar. We have healthcare leaders from several health systems coming together. Experts from VMware. And we're going to hear about multi-cloud solutions, enterprise cloud, cloud, native workforce, and obviously the ecosystem that brings that all together. You can get more information on our website this week health.com top right hand corners where our webinars are. You can also get more information in the description box below. Love to have you join us, please register again Thursday, October 13th 📍 from one to 2:00 PM Eastern time. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.