Solving IT talent shortages in healthcare with a virtualized network

Many healthcare organizations struggle to find IT staff with the specialized experience needed to maintain a secure infrastructure. Additionally, organizations often only have a budget for fewer employees than needed to keep their networks operating smoothly.

The result: making IT decisions based on the available employees and their skill level—instead of making the right choice for the organization both today and in the future.

While many organizations move to virtualized networks to save costs and eliminate purchasing expensive hardware, using a cloud-base infrastructure also helps solve the IT talent issue. Here are three ways virtualized networks help improve IT talent and skill issues:

1. Improves efficiency during nights, weekends and holidays

Unlike other industries, healthcare IT is a 24/7 business. Finding IT staff who are willing to work nights and weekends often proves challenging, especially since they can find other jobs with regular 9-to-5 hours.

Often, the more senior level IT experts work the day shift, which makes it difficult to maintain a high level of IT excellence 24/7. In a virtualized network environment, changes to the network can be made through an online portal, rather than having to dispatch a technician. That means a potentially faster and less expensive approach to keeping your network running smoothly.

2. Adds specialized security talent to your team

Finding talent, particularly those with experience in security, isn’t easy either. A 2017 survey conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group and the Information Systems Security Association found that 51 percent of cybersecurity professionals reported a talent shortage in security expertise at their organization.

Virtual vendors employ top security experts to address security issues for their clients—experts who are out of reach for most healthcare systems. Additionally, network service and cloud providers constantly monitor threats and receive information from government agencies about new and evolving threats.

With a virtualized network, software updates to your firewall can be made much quicker than asking your IT staff to take on the task manually.

3. Allows IT department to spend time on other projects

Purchasing new equipment, installing routers and maintaining specialized, on-premise hardware takes time—often lots of time. Every hour spent on these tasks takes staff away from supporting clinical applications or medical equipment that improves patient care.

With a virtualized network, your IT staff no longer manages on-premise equipment, which means they can spend time on projects that improve efficiency and patient care.