Healthcare brings out a lot of passion in people these days. Many of the topics stridently debated are surprisingly relevant to enterprise storage:
Universal coverage
All business data isn’t created equal, but there is a threshold of storage, management, protection and security below which any business data should not fall. Sometimes people lose sight of where that line is, to their company’s and their career’s detriment.
Cost control
Data volume continues to grow faster than even my annual health benefits contribution. Businesses do the math – they just can’t increase their storage costs to match. Much like healthcare, one solution is to provide ‘good enough’ storage for low maintenance data and optional premium services for data that needs more performance and additional protection from risk. But how good is good enough?
Robin Harris has an opinion on this.
Who gets premium services?
Like healthcare, some of the most passionate debate is what data sets require that extra care. Storage technology is now starting to make these decisions automatically based on activity or other metrics. Still, mainstream IT struggles with knowing when to take data from the ’premium plan’ – mission-critical enterprise solutions – to slower, high-capacity options.
Who pays?
Healthcare costs are going up for everyone, and employees are carrying a heavier burden. Some say this incents people to make more efficient choices on medical costs. Data owners are seeing the IT version of a high deductible plan with more aggressive and granular chargeback policies.
Whatever the outcome of the Grand Healthcare Debate of 2009 and the less-momentus-but-still-important storage debate, we all benefit from the conversation.
What do you think?