Reply To: Week 4 Topic 1

[Ching To Chung]

I think I would consider moving to cloud computing after making a judgment based on the techicalities (the budget, how to migrate/transition the current system to cloud, etc.). Cloud computing can drastically reduce the cost of IT hardware and maintanence, and is a lot more scalable. For example, if we expect a new hospital block to be built in the future and the hospital has to accept a lot more patients, we could expand the cloud services capacity at a low cost. In contrast, if we take the traditional on-site way, hospital expansion may mean huge costs to purchase a few more mainframe computers as servers to store and process more patient data. Cloud computing often means there are multiple data centers storing the data and there are redundancies, which means theoretically it is more secure than storing data on-site. For example, if the hospital’s computers are somehow damaged, e.g. in a fire, flood, or electrical surge, the patient’s data may be lost forever, but this is not the case in cloud computing. Furthermore, using cloud computing may mean that it is easier to share and collaborate with other hospitals which have also transitioned to cloud computing. This could boost convenience in information transfer and research efforts.