Welcome to the Episode 336, part of the continuing series called “Behind the Scenes of the NetApp Tech ONTAP Podcast.”
This week, NetApp Healthcare experts Kim Garriott (kim.garriott@netapp.com) and Tony Turner (tony.turner@netapp.com) join me to discuss medical imaging and where the cloud journey for those workloads currently stands.
For more information:
ttps://www.netapp.com/blog/file-services-in-the-cloud/
https://www.netapp.com/blog/medical-imaging-cloud-gets-day-in-sun/
https://www.netapp.com/blog/enterprise-medical-imaging-cloud
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Transcription
The following transcript was generated using Otter.ai transcription service. As it is AI generated, YMMV.
Unknown Speaker 0:33
Hello, and welcome to Tech ONTAP podcast. My name is Justin Parisi. I’m here in the basement of my house. And with me today, I have a couple of special guests to talk to us about medical imaging and how NetApp fits in there. So with us today, I have Tony Turner, Tony, what do you do here at NetApp? And how do I reach you? Hey, Justin, thanks for having me today. So I am a business development manager with a combination of a clinical and an IT background specific to medical imaging. All right, and how do we reach you?
Unknown Speaker 1:04
You can reach me at tony.turner@netapp.com. Okay. Also with us today, Kim Garriott is here. So Kim, did I pronounce that correctly? And how do we reach you? Hi, yeah, you got it spot on.
Unknown Speaker 1:17
I’m Kim Garriott, and I am the Chief Innovation Officer for NetApp healthcare and life sciences. And I lead our medical imaging verticals specifically, you can reach me at kim.garriott@netapp.com. All right, excellent. So you know, before we start with the NetApp angle here, we like to always cover the high level. So Chem, medical imaging, tell me all about that. Yeah, so medical imaging, maybe not surprising, comprises at least 80% Eight 0% of all clinical data generated globally. So within the healthcare industry, medical imaging is big data. And it comprises all different types of imaging. And historically, when we think about medical imaging, we always think about radiology or cardiology imaging, but today, it’s really enterprise imaging, meaning it’s all multimedia generated across a healthcare enterprise, whether that is radiology and cardiology, or it’s ophthalmology, or women’s health or surgical scope imaging, or dermatology, wound care, even auditory files or videos that we record, from patients, medical conditions. So it really is far reaching. And we now are starting to see what we consider the last analog imaging workload, which is pathology and the digitization of the glass slides that we normally historically have looked at through a microscope. And now we are digitizing those whole glass slides, and creating this brand new field of digital pathology. And we really view that again as that last analog imaging workload, and the size of those images, shadows, any type of medical imaging that we’ve digitized, or we have in a native digital format to date. So that’s very exciting. And it also is bringing top of mind for healthcare, IT leaders, how are they going to manage? How are they going to scale and have the appropriate governance in place to be able to effectively manage all of this huge amount of data that’s about ready to come our way. And when we talk about huge amounts of data, it’s generally unstructured data. So Tony, tell me a little bit about how NetApp handles that particular workload use case? Well, so NetApp is unique, because we have one of the most robust cloud portfolios out there and have the ability, of course, to create a hybrid cloud environment. So on prem, we would normally use our on tap product with FAS or fabric attached storage, and manage that with capacity drives. But now with that we have on tap deployed and all the major cloud service providers, we can leverage that capability to move data in and out of the between on premise and cloud. Or if the customer is interested in using object, we could create a private cloud environment with our storage grid product. What benefits does NetApp offer that you wouldn’t see with other providers, our presence and the amount of work we’ve done and success we’ve had with all the major cloud service providers is, you know, I think that’s one of the biggest differentiators. But you what we do is we have a couple of things. We have a healthcare team that is not only out pushing boxes, you know, we have a clinical background, we’ve got years of experience. So the product
Unknown Speaker 5:00
mics that we put in front of our customers not only handle the technical aspect, they are they have a clinical relevance, where they make sense in the clinical workflow. So we’re not just because it’s a shiny object, it’s got some new cool features, it may not really fit all the, the requirements of a clinical workload. And so that’s kind of what our team brings to the table. So.
Unknown Speaker 5:28
But some of the things that we do, first off, you know, data security ransomware is is a huge concern, especially with health care providers being targeted. No NET app is unique that we have our integrated security products already built in, and then all of the aspects beyond just having the products built in. So being able to create, you know, immutable backups and indelible backups where perpetrator could, even though they could get in and start encrypting or impacting different files on premise, or even into the cloud. You know, one of the trends we’re seeing right now is they’re also doing, they’re deleting backups, they’re deleting snapshots. And these guys are patients, they’ve been in there, you know, three or four months before they decide to trigger the infection. You know, we can protect against that by having some type of, you know, air gapped or golden copy of the, you know, the images elsewhere, instead of being where that perpetrator could get to those camp, in your experience in the industry. There are processes in place that were used for medical imaging, and now they’ve had to change quite a bit since we’ve had the pandemic, because you’ve had more remote work, or you’ve had more need to go put things elsewhere than your on prem data center. So how was all that change between then and now?
Unknown Speaker 6:58
Yeah, that’s a great question, Justin, we’ve seen really a dynamic shift in attitude towards the cloud. When we first were looking at cloud technologies, pre pandemic, there was a lot of resistance from health care, health, IT leadership, there were a lot of unknowns, right, they’d all heard stories of people who had tried to shift their workloads to the cloud, but then very quickly reversed back when they got those first monthly invoices, as there were a lot of hidden or an, you know, misunderstood cost structures. We also, as you pointed out, saw a need to really drive to more remote work processes, because you know, our, IT professionals couldn’t get into the data centers during the early days of the pandemic, to even you know, manage the system. So, now coming out of the pandemic, organizations have a better understanding of how they can leverage the cloud, they have a better comfort level with the security safeguards around cloud, because that was something that was really highlighted pre pandemic, is there were a lot of security concerns as well as those cost concerns. Now, as we fast forward, something has, you know, interestingly changed in that now all of our imaging, it software vendors are on the race to be able to create cloud based hosted application as a service models and storage as a service models to accommodate this demand that they’re now seeing out of the healthcare organizations because there is this emerging level of comfort, and this realization that they need to be able to have environments, hosted environments that are readily accessible no matter where you are, or the type of access that you have to a physical building. So this is a really exciting time for us. As Tony mentioned, we do have, you know, just really fantastic relationships with all of the major public cloud providers, and the unique nature of our ONTAP operating system that really helps to bridge that hybrid cloud experience and help both the software vendors as well as their customers be able to get a jumpstart on their cloud journey. So we’re excited as we come out of this post pandemic era, and very excited to see what the future holds and how netup can be part of that cloud journey. So Tony, you know, we do have a cloud story here at NetApp. What are you telling your healthcare customers about how to get to the cloud as well as how to leverage it best? A lot of you know, as Kim mentioned, that the pandemic has definitely created a lot more buzz and it’s served to help customers or providers feel more comfortable about putting patient information or Ph i out into the cloud. We have a almost like a journey map. So in imaging, you know, traditionally you always have to have two to four copies of images. They’re supposed to be geographically dispersed in two separate locations most of the time
Unknown Speaker 10:00
You know, the cost factor in, you know, having the resources to manage a second data center, a lot of time, that’s cost prohibitive. So, you know, customers do their best to meet those requirements in whatever fashion and it may be two separate locations that are all across the street from each other. What the cloud environment does is it allows them now to be able to take advantage that. So when we’ve created this journey, we talked through the steps of getting to the cloud, where, you know, it may be a five to seven year journey, where imaging as a service would be the final resting place. But as that journey may begin, it may just be putting a tertiary copy to cover that customer through some disaster, or putting their secondary copy into one of the cloud providers, while they still maintain their presence in do business as usual, on premise. So, you know, one of the things that we do is we walk them through that journey, we talk about the different scenarios, we talk about flexibility. And we talk about clinical relevance. What we’re still challenged with, though, is that customers confidence, you know, health care, they’re not trailblazers, they’re not they’re not wanting to be first in the market, you know, when it comes to their clinical risk, and they try new things. So, you know, we still are up against kind of that comfort level with customers and how they perceive cloud as it lives in technology revenue. Are you finding that your healthcare customers are looking more at the managed service? Cloud type, like the CVS pieces, or the Azure NetApp files? Are they looking at the more of the self managed stuff like NSX, or CVS? What’s their preference? When they’re looking at cloud solutions for on top, it’s kind of interesting. Every provider in some way has tied themselves to a certain cloud provider, every healthcare provider. So when you when you get into these conversations, the first thing you kind of ask them is, do you like this one vendor or this other vendor? You know, or is this a multi cloud environment. And that kind of drives the conversation a little bit, I think the customers feel more comfortable with first party services, because they understand when you put big names like Amazon and Microsoft, in front of some of these offerings, you know, NetApp, clinically in in healthcare have always been behind the scenes. So that that helps a little bit as well. But you know, product wise, you know, a lot of the first party services, I think the maturity level of the features are still being developed. So we have a little bit more functionality in some of the the NET app on tap features. So it just really depends on you know, what we’re talking about at the time cam, in your experience, would a health care provider look more at a managed service or something they have to manage themselves? Like? Are they gonna take the easiest way? Or are they going to try to have more control over the data?
Unknown Speaker 13:05
Yeah, that’s a great question, Justin, in what we see in the healthcare space, especially with imaging data, is that the organizations very tightly work and with and follow their imaging software vendor, there are such high demands for performance and accessibility to this data, because it’s so critical to the clinical process, imagine patient presenting to the ED with head trauma, you need to be able to scan that patient and have a doctor have access to those images in nanoseconds very, very quickly, milliseconds. So what we see is our healthcare organization is very reliant on the guidance and direction of their imaging software vendors. So when we work with customers who are wanting to start their cloud journey, the first thing we do is really work with the imaging software vendor to understand where they have evolved their product line for cloud, is a cloud ready? Is it cloud optimized? Or do they still really want to hold that on prem experience, because they don’t yet have their product optimized in a way that will meet those service level agreements that they have with the customer. Just to kind of add to that a lot of our healthcare customers, you know, they’re getting ramped up in cloud, we’re finding that some customers feel that once you move to cloud, everything is automatically backed up or protected. But they don’t really understand the fact that you still have to protect your data, backup your data. So there’s a little bit of an educational process. And then the other thing is the resource constraints, you know, right now, at the amount of the data growth, the procurement process
Unknown Speaker 15:00
hedging firmware upgrades, just the churn of on prem hardware management care and feeding that type of stuff. You know, the idea of being able to not have to worry about that. And being able to go through a procurement where you’re clicking buttons and getting it paying by, you know, operating expense. I think that’s kind of an idea when or, you know, resources can focus on higher quality clinical type improvements versus, you know, just the maintenance of their hardware, just to answer your question about managed services specifically. So as these imaging, software vendors are getting ready, their applications to be hosted in the cloud, they are all looking to provide application as a service to their customers. Because of the demand that Tony just mentioned, healthcare organizations are looking to really reduce their data center footprint, reduce the complexity of those maintenance tasks that their staff have to do today, and would like to focus them on higher value tasks. With that said, we are seeing the trend for application as a service. But we know that for the foreseeable future, as we’re moving towards the cloud, we are going to have a hybrid environment with some level of application management and storage management on prem. So some imaging software vendors are starting to talk about developing holistic managed services offerings for their customers, but most of them right now are focusing their efforts on just getting the application in the cloud. But definitely customer demand is there, we are seeing it where customers do want to have turnkey services, whether that’s for their on prem components, as well as their cloud components so that they can really kind of get out of the business of that day to day operations of it, and really focus on more strategic high value objectives that really are their core business, which is taking care of patients with the subject of data governance, I understand that there’s a lot of regulation around anonymization of data. So is there any change in how we have to anonymize the data from being on prem versus in the cloud? Or does do those data structures pretty much remain the same? Because it was anonymized enough to be in the cloud? Yeah, so in that imaging field, we’re not really talking about or having conversations around concerns about needing to anonymize patient health information or patient identical identifiable information in the cloud, we’ve really evolved to the point where organizations have that comfort, to not have that information anonymized because it is keep in mind, even though it’s in the cloud, it’s for primary diagnosis is for primary care. So we really can’t anonymize that information and have our
Unknown Speaker 18:03
health IT systems work in the way that they were designed. Now, we do talk about anonymization of patient data and how that relates to the cloud. When we talk about the commercialization of data, and there’s a lot of conversation around it in healthcare. It is provocative, if you can imagine, some patients and maybe many of us don’t necessarily have a comfort level with our personal demographic information being associated with the clinical data that is generated by my encounter with a health care facility. So in that we see burgeoning or new conversations happening on how can we anonymize that data in the, you know, the most strict ways possible to protect patient identity, but still be able to leverage the wealth of clinical information in AI model development or analytics and research that will really help drive better outcomes for patients by harnessing the power of that data. So that’s really what we’re seeing is more in the commercialization or monetization of data to be used for research. That’s where we have the conversations coming in around the anonymization of data. But for day to day clinical use, which is primarily what organizations are focused on today, that anonymization concern has been resolved, we’ve definitely seen a shift in conversation. So we’ve been piling on medical images that 25 or 30 years now, and providers do not delete images. But two or three years ago, we were having conversations about, well how do we trim down or do like a policy based deletion of certain type of images? So we’re not having to you know, to maintain these large archives and now with artificial intelligence
Unknown Speaker 20:00
augmented intelligence machine learning, you know, now data has value. And so these conversations have not been shifted or have shifted from, how do I delete images to now? How do we commercialize in some folks the taboo word, maybe monetize their data to be a profit center. So definitely a shift there. So anytime you start to bring in the idea of trying to make money off of someone else’s data there, there becomes an ethical and controversial aspect to that. So how are providers handling that can like, how are they addressing that? And how are they explaining, providing this type of valuable data for free, you know, if you go back to the dawn of time of the practice of medicine, we have always improved how we practice medicine and how we care for patients based on historical experiences with other patients, whether that’s clinical trials, whether that is using interesting clinical cases, to educate other clinicians, so that we are constantly improving the practice of medicine. So this is not new in medicine, but what is new is, we can do it so much more quickly and more effectively now, by leveraging digital data in this way. And I do think it is that patients, but I know I certainly don’t as a as a human being and as an individual, individual patient, I want my medical data to be used to, you know, further how we take care of populations of care. So that’s where that anonymization comes in, and why that’s so important, or D identifying those images. So myself as a patient, I do have a problem with my personal demographic information being shared, or for someone to be able to find out that that was specifically a medical condition that I had. But if I know that that data is being cared for in a way that properly anonymizes it, then I personally don’t have a problem with that, I think most people do not have a problem with that. And also we have cared for this, again, in healthcare in the practice of health care. For decades, upon decades, we have to sign as patients consent forms for how our data is used. Every time we are admitted to a hospital, we’re asked to sign a release of information document which we can refuse to, to sign if we choose to. But in that release of information, if we
Unknown Speaker 22:34
decide to sign it, or in that release to use my data or share my data,
Unknown Speaker 22:39
we can send that many times for research, my data can be used. So that’s an old standing process that organizations have had around the use of data, and that safeguard that they put in place with their patients. These types of consents are being updated and modernized to fit how we now can harness the power of that data. And so patients still control that at the very simplest form of just saying, Yes, I give my consent for my data to be used for research or or No, I’m not comfortable with that. As far as data protection goes, you Tony touched on the netup aspect of snapshots and replication, that sort of thing. I understand there’s an idea of an off site backup here, Tony. So what are you seeing for people to backup their medical imaging workloads to somewhere that maybe isn’t an on tap system? Like what are they using, that’s a net up solution today, when you start talking about backup of images. This started out where LTO tape was like the method because it was easily to take off site capacities were good. But as image sizes grew, then you know that tape basically was not, you know, restoring from tape. It just wasn’t realistic anymore. So that kind of went by the wayside, and then they come out with a CD jukeboxes and blu ray jukeboxes, and that kind of went away. It says, spinning disk is really the thing. Most protection schemes within medical imaging is basically having multiple copies of your images. You know, snapshotting, you know, to pets to petabyte data is probably not a good idea. You know, and so, when you talk about securing and data protection, it’s a combination of features in order to do that, but right now it is less just copy the data to a second copy and have that data available in case the primary copy is gone. And that’s it’s simplistic forms. That’s how it’s done today. What about things like SnapMirror cloud or snap mirror s3? Are you seeing some uptake and people wanting to use that to convert these types of images? You know, medical images to objects are absolutely okay. Absolutely. Great question. So, it what it boils down to though is you
Unknown Speaker 25:00
What are they going to do clinically with that second copy? So are they looking? Or they’re looking just for a disaster recovery copy? Or are they looking for some type of clinical business continuity copy, where if the primary was gone, that they could start refocusing, or basically repoint, the application and all the modalities to that second copy. When you talk about that, you know, then you have to have compute or the or the imaging application available in that cloud provider. That’s one use case. Now, if you’re talking about just a, you know, a secondary copy of those images into a cloud provider, then, you know, that kind of opens up the gamut of NetApp products that allows you to do that. And, you know, you mentioned several there, you know, you could snap vault them somewhere. You mentioned s3 in the cloud, there are several ways of doing that piece of it cam, I understand that this cloud stuff is pretty new to a lot of our customers. And I, I’m guessing that not a lot of them are there yet, but I’m thinking that a lot of them are are planning on it, or they’re preparing for it. So as a data storage company, a cloud company, what does NetApp doing to help them get there? Like, what sort of conversations are we having? And what sort of workloads are we looking at first? Yeah, so you’re absolutely right, Justin, it is very early days for health care provider or hospital organizations to be thinking about managing their data in the cloud. But because of the unique way that our netup healthcare team, and especially our imaging team, is situated in the market, coming from clinical backgrounds, really being thought leaders in this medical imaging space, our customers and even organizations that aren’t our customers are coming to us and asking us, Hey, how do we get started on our cloud journey, and especially with this new digital pathology, workload that were just again, very early days of adoption of this in hospitals and other clinical environments. But with this coming, CIOs are seeing the need to be able to, you know, leverage the cloud in some way in their journey, because in the future, whether that is five, 710 years away, they know that cloud is going to be commonplace, and they need to start building those thoughts into their multi year strategy. So we are helping organizations to think through both the clinical implications, as well as the technical implications of moving to the cloud, and how best to get started on that journey. Because we still have, you know, a ways to go when it comes to getting to cloud comfort right now, I think we really have a lot of cloud curiosity, right. But we want to get to a point where we are comfortable in the cloud. And the way to do that is to take especially with healthcare, where we’re talking about patient data, and we’re talking about data that needs to be available very quickly. And we still are faced with internet bandwidth issues in some geographies around the country and certainly around the globe. So we suggest and recommend to our customers that they take a stepwise approach to the cloud, that helps them mitigate their risk. So looking at the cloud journey, is a very valuable exercise for organizations to do and marry that with their risk tolerance. Many organizations are first starting at looking to put a disaster recovery copy in the cloud, or maybe a backup copy in the cloud, then we’re see organizations you know, start to get a little bit more comfortable, they’re getting some invoices on their cloud consumption, they’re understanding how to handle the financial aspects of it, and you know, comfortable that there’s no hidden surprises there, then we’re going to see organizations start to put their secondary application and data management technologies in the cloud so that they have their primary environment on prem, their secondary or failover environment in the cloud. So if that primary on prem environment goes down, they fail over to that cloud environment. Maybe they even do that in a planned way, two or three times a year, and they stay operating in the cloud for short periods of time to really understand what that user experience is going to be like, then we’ll see a switch from that in about we’re estimating five to seven years. We’ll see organizations now starting to put their primary environment in the cloud both application and storage and have that smaller secondary environment on prem. And then, as both this
Unknown Speaker 30:00
software vendors have cloud optimized and their offerings in the cloud. And we have customer comfort with the cloud, and approximately 10 to 12 years, we’ll see a switch where we have all 100% hosted environments in the cloud, with really little or no on prem presence at all. So we’re helping our customers today understand how to get started on their cloud journey, and what’s best for them. And then also how they can enhance their image lifecycle data management. By Of course, we’re not deleting images, most organizations are not deleting images, we’re seeing that value that we mentioned earlier in our conversation. But we still need to manage that data in a cost effective, responsible way. And the cloud also gives us that flexibility to manage that data in less expensive tiers of capacity management. So you when you were talking about that, you mentioned the cost aspect. And that got me thinking that with Cloud, your cost structures change in the way that you pay for things change. Because you know, with on prem, you’re buying the equipment, but then you have all these costs that you don’t actually see that you said hidden costs, well on prem has a lot of that with paying your people to manage it, or paying the power and cooling. So, Tony, how are you having these conversations with people that potentially get sticker shock? When they see that initial cloud bill? Like how are you telling me, Hey, this is expected, but look at how much you’re saving based on these other factors. Right. And so that’s kind of a misunderstanding, I think within some of the healthcare providers is, Cloud is not necessarily cheaper. But the the savings that you’ll realize, maybe not as clear right now, or might come in a different form, other than we’re saving money on storage, as you mentioned, you know, resources, not having to pay for all his environmental goals. So one of the things that we’re finding is, a lot of these a lot of our customers, they don’t really have a full understanding. If you take just the data center environment, how much is the cooling, how much is the power, and so they don’t have a good basis, or a good baseline to compare that in a cloud environment. The other thing is, you know, from a medical standpoint, the way the clinical workflows go,
Unknown Speaker 32:35
a lot of relevant prior images get pulled back for comparison when a radiologist reads. And so there’s a lot of concerns about those egress rates and how that’s going to impact organization. And, you know, Kim kind of mentioned sticker shock, what happens if they all of a sudden just get this big bill that they weren’t ready for?
Unknown Speaker 32:57
So there’s a lot of unknowns. The other thing it’s doing is
Unknown Speaker 33:01
it’s forcing these customers to look at their clinical workflows to have a better understanding of how many relevant priors do they pull back in how big their on premise cash needs to be, and that sort of thing. So there’s a lot of unknowns, they don’t really realize that we’re trying to help them, at least make sure they’re addressing that. And Justin, you know, we’re just scratching the surface on what this new world in the cloud will bring to us what advantages this brings to us and help it. And I don’t hear these advantages, these longer term advantages really talked about yet in the, you know, cost scenario, or even in the feasibility scenario. But when we, you know, start to look in more granular level of detail at what an organization does, we do a lot of testing in health IT every time we have a system upgrade, there is significant testing that occurs and what is needed to do appropriate testing of systems, test systems, right? You need those secondary environments, for development or for testing that comes at a very high cost to organizations today, because they’re having to buy separate servers, separate separate storage, on top of the licensing fees for the software that their software vendor charges them for those test environments. And oftentimes, that’s a highly discounted cost, right? Because it’s a test environment. But from a hardware perspective, you still have to buy hardware. Moving to the cloud allows us to avoid ever having to do that. Again, we can use flexpen technology to very quickly spin up a test environment for the exact amount of time that it’s needed without buying a lot of on prem hardware to go inside.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
A data center that has to be managed by someone and takes up valuable real estate. And you only need it for certain times during the year or for certain testing events. So when we start start to look at the cost advantages, or cost avoidance that we’ll have in setting up these test environments and the quality, that it adds to our IT upgrades, that’s a big cost advantage that a lot of organizations aren’t looking at yet. And then ultimately, when our health IT software vendors are all operating with cloud hosted
Unknown Speaker 35:37
applications, when we start to think about how we even take a software upgrade will be very different, it will be vastly different. If you know we have standardization across the board, on how these systems are configured, software vendors will be able to push software upgrades dynamically to their customers, without a lot of on prem preparation and testing. So the future is very bright for the use of cloud. And there are a lot of advantages that we’ve not even started talking about in the industry. Because right now we’re just, you know, thinking about, I’m replacing x with y in the cloud, and that has a cost. But let’s look more globally, at the advantages and how this is going to radically change the way we do business. And how we can bring improved features and functionality to our clinicians in a much more fast way, or a much quicker way in the future than we can do today. Yeah, I think I think that’s a great point, Kim, because like, when you start talking about some of the general cloud benefits, like elasticity, and beta, the spin up and spin down the application, during peak hours birth, I mean, those are savings are really liberalizations that are years away from from most of these guys. And then at the same time, you have software imaging vendors that are still trying to figure out how to containerize their application to, you know, to have that micro service type environment to be more efficient in the cloud. So a lot of moving parts. And a lot of the stuff that we want to talk about is is hard for customers to wrap their head around because they’re still waiting on their imaging vendors to catch up. So as far as the cost thing goes, we’ll go back to that, it sounds like with the cloud, you can move more of your OP x into capex, which also means that that becomes more of a predictable thing, right? You’re not, you’re not dealing with any variances there, it’s always going to be pretty much the same, from month to month is that is that an accurate statement, Tony, image sizes are increasing as technology increases. So they’re producing more images, so they get bigger and bigger.
Unknown Speaker 37:49
In and then one of the things that is a popular trend is just mergers and acquisitions. So, you know, their volumes may change radically, in you know, three years from now, five years from now, there’s a lot of uncertainty in that. And that’s just the nature of healthcare, with them not understanding, you know, their workflows the way they should, and understanding what those egress fees may be. I just don’t think that’s a comfort level. And that’s something that they’re gonna have to have to just dip their toe in and start looking at. And that’s why we see this as a journey, and not just a big bang, you know, let’s move all the imaging into the cloud, just an all add on to that as well. Many healthcare organizations tend to favor a CapEx model, because of their tax status and their financial structure. And moving to the cloud, you know, will be a financial difference for them as well as moves into an object model. So I do think that we will see some latency in organizations in all organizations being able to kind of move as quickly as they would like to to the cloud, because there’s financial restructuring that may need to take place in that organization to be able to, you know, accommodate that off expending differently than how they were able to accommodate the capex funding and even some of the tax employment implications that goes along with that. A lot of customers are waiting for hardware to age out. They’re trying to they’re trying to maximize their estimate their capital investments before they, you know, they’re just not replacing old stuff with new stuff. They are transitioning it so there’s a little bit of that going on as well. Alright, sounds like we’re learning a lot of good lessons here about medical imaging. So Kim, could you give me some?
Unknown Speaker 39:38
I want you to give me one thing that you wish people would know about NetApp and medical imaging that maybe they don’t know.
Unknown Speaker 39:45
Yeah, one exciting thing to know is that NetApp is your partner in your cloud journey. We are uniquely positioned with all of the major public cloud providers and helping them build
Unknown Speaker 40:00
Cloud solutions for medical imaging. And this is because of our unique nature of our ONTAP operating system that, again, bridges that hybrid experience. But also because NetApp is unique in having first party native file services that the public cloud providers are relying on to help bridge the gaps that they have in functionality to be in medical imaging, specifically, because it is so file service heavy, you need to be able to have a very strong file data management partner, to be able to then bridge to all of the goodness of objects that we find in the cloud. So take comfort, that NetApp is on the bleeding edge of this technology and working with the cloud providers and the imaging software vendors to provide the very best experience for our customers in in very short order.
Unknown Speaker 40:56
And, Tony, same question, what is one thing that you wish people would know about NetApp? And medical imaging that maybe they don’t know? Yeah, I mentioned earlier that NETOPS not one of those, those vendors, it just kind of rolls off the tongue when you’re talking about medical imaging in clinical workflows. So, you know, we have a dedicated team that you know, Kim and I both have over 30 years of experience clinically, and with healthcare IT. And so we’re not here just to push boxes, we are here to help you with an enterprise imaging strategy, we’re here to help you on your cloud journey. Or if you you know, you’re not interested in either of those, we can help just talk about on premise, you know, lifecycle management of your images. And this is not just for healthcare providers, this is for NetApp partners as well. A lot of times when you get into healthcare conversations, it seems like they’re speaking a different language, then we can help you those interpreters and help you build those configurations for your customers. So So I understand that we have some new information out there about medical imaging and NetApp in the form of blog. So where would I find those? Oh, Justin, you can find our new blogs that will help you understand how to get your cloud journey started. With medical imaging and the value of file services in the cloud as it relates to medical imaging. You can find those blogs and much more content on netapp.com. And just navigate to our industries solution page and click on healthcare or simply Google NET app healthcare. And you’ll find a quick link there.
Unknown Speaker 42:34
All right, excellent. And Tony, do you have any other information when people can find out there? I mean, we we have, you know, just a whole slew of collateral in several different forms. And uh, you and I’ve done a podcast in the past around image lifecycle management. We’ve got multiple blogs and one pagers on different aspects of imaging. So you know, Kim mentioned that the healthcare place on that app.com And then
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