Battle Royale in the Cloud.
The battle for the healthcare cloud is heating up between Big Tech titans as they compete for health data storage contracts (paywall – WSJ) with big-time health systems.
As one of the final frontiers for Amazon, Google, and others, these Cloud contracts could get a foot in the door to work with healthcare folks that could result in long, lucrative relationships that expand beyond just the Cloud.
Recent Cloud deals announced included Google and the Mayo Clinic, Microsoft and Providence St. Joe’s, and plenty of others. Generally, the agreements really are just for storage of healthcare and financial information.
Are you a healthcare provider? You can make your organization cloud-first, you just need to learn how. Ready to learn? https://t.co/qzuw8jczox pic.twitter.com/OJRKzRLHVp
— AWS for Government (@AWS_Gov) September 9, 2019
But we already know that Big Tech has plans to expand capabilities further, like including electronic health records and finding clinically useful information for trials and other treatments.
Of course, these developments come with a slew of problems – namely, privacy concerns (shout out HIPAA) and security issues (healthcare companies literally get hacked all the time) so…we’ll see where it goes from here.
Tech firms might not be too worried about that, though. How mad would shareholders be if they missed out on the market expected to reach $100 billion by 2025?