| | March 20178CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONVirtualize, Cloud, Mobile FirstBy Wes Wright, CTO, Sutter HealthThat's our strategy for getting to our vision of "Making technology as transparent as possible to our clinical and business partners." Our strategy probably seems pretty familiar to most because the CEO of Microsoft has stated their vision as being "Cloud First, Mobile First." Satya Nadella is a brilliant man, and has done nothing short of work miracles at Microsoft from both a product and cultural perspective since he took the reins. But, I think he would have been well served by putting "virtualize" in his mission statement. Unless of course, he's included that portion in the "Cloud First" part of his statement, which many folks do.I'm not one of them. I believe virtualization itself is one of the pillars of good IT and can stand separate from the cloud and mobile. At Sutter Health, we've managed to virtualize nearly 90 percent of our server infrastructure and have just begun our journey in desktop virtualization, using the Citrix Workspace Suite as our primary platform with many other tools surrounding it.As we've moved down the desktop virtualization path, we've begun to realize that in order for us to be cloud and mobile first, we absolutely have to abstract our desktops from the hardware of the PC. Once you do that, you can then run that desktop from any number of places. Microsoft and Citrix are now offering a Win10 desktop as a service. Of course Amazon Web Services was one of the first companies to offer desktop as a service, more than a few years ago. However, that offering, unlike most virtual desktop installations, wasn't really running a "desktop" operating system. Instead, Amazon was offering a server desktop "skinned" to look like a normal windows desktop, due to Microsoft licensing constraints. Fortunately, Microsoft has since changed their licensing model and the new Microsoft/Citrix offering is much like you would run a virtual desktop implementation on premise. Because of that, it's super easy to move your on premise desktop virtualization solution into the Microsoft/Citrix cloud offering.An added benefit of running from the Microsoft/Citrix solution is the proximity of the O365 Cloud. We run the O365 suite as part of our virtualized desktop. Our goal is to move our non-patient care virtualized desktops into the Microsoft/Citrix cloud. This will allow most all the traffic generated by these desktops to remain in the Microsoft cloud with our applications and storage (OneDrive). In turn, that allows us to apply resource that was being used for desktop virtualization to our clinical Wes Wright
< Page 7 | Page 9 >