Infrastructure as Code, also known as IaC, has been integral in many organizations and allows them to quickly set up and maintain infrastructure without too much human intervention. For the healthcare industry, IaC has provided many different benefits, from supporting remote work teams to creating more secure infrastructures that medical firms can rely on.
Why Infrastructure as Code is used in the medical industry
For those unaware of what IaC is, it is an automated way to configure information technology infrastructure using machine-readable configuration files. These configuration files are set up by people and used by the machines to perform as instructed. In other words, a person writes the instructions, and the machines follow the instructions down to the final dot. As one can tell, it saves a lot of time not having to manually set up infrastructure by hand and reduces the possibility of making errors that can compromise the system.
In terms of the medical industry, IaC provides many benefits that cannot be ignored. These benefits range from faster and more efficient application builds to the speedy recovery of software. IaC also provides more reliable and consistent deployment, whether on the firm’s premises or in the cloud network.
Overall, the ability to set up configuration files for machines has allowed the healthcare industry to create changes that save time and money. It also assists in complying with the standards set forth by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
One of the key highlights that IaC has introduced to the healthcare industry has to be its efficiency and security. IaC provides quick and precise control over a practice’s infrastructure and, because all of its configuration files have been prewritten, quick response to any situation, such as during an emergency that requires data recovery.
This is different from traditional development methods, resulting in infrastructures that do not give the desired output. This happens because humans tend to make mistakes. Even professionals can be somewhat inconsistent at times, and more often than not, it is the human variable that introduced issues into any infrastructure.
IaC solves this problem by allowing every infrastructure set up to be a lot more consistent. As a result, maintaining the desired results while still reducing the risk of any problems has become much more straightforward and attainable.
Conclusion
In summary, IaC has been incredibly beneficial to the health industry by reducing wasted time, effort, and even money having to set up, configure, and reconfigure infrastructures. It does this by reducing the human variable, which also enhances the security, performance, and consistency of each infrastructure as they are all based on configuration files.
That said, one final advantage of IaC is its scalability. Rather than having to make manual changes to the infrastructure to adjust it to the needs of the medical practice, all that needs to be done is to configure the files and run them. This ensures that infrastructures scale up and down as needed quickly and efficiently. It also ensures security because there is little to no divergence between the code and infrastructure. After all, the change itself was initiated by the code.
Dose of Healthcare is an online healthcare blog providing various resources to keep you up to date with the latest medical news. For more on the healthcare industry, check out more on our blog.
