As chief information officer of the 1,800-bed Orlando Health System, Rick Schooler needs to house 180 terabytes of medical images. That’s more than three times the print holdings of the Library of Congress. “Within three years we’ll be at 300 terabytes or more,” Schooler says.
That’s a costly challenge. Storage gear isn’t cheap and has to be kept cool by expensive air-conditioning. To keep expenses in check, Schooler has begun turning over online backup storage to Internet security provider Symantec. He says the pilot program may help him slash his storage budget — currently at “hundreds of thousands of dollars” — by 20 percent to 25 percent.
Orlando joins a growing number of businesses embracing what’s known as cloud computing, where tasks such as storage and database management are handled off-site and delivered via the Internet by companies including Amazon.com, Microsoft and Google.
Cloud computing is gaining wider acceptance: Sales of cloud-based applications are growing five times faster than those of traditional applications, according to Goldman Sachs and Piper Jaffray. “The cloud is as profound an impact on what technology will look like in 20 years as the PC,” says Walter C. Price, Managing Director at RCM Capital Management, which owns 583,000 shares of Salesforce.com and 1.1 million shares of SuccessFactors according to Bloomberg Data. Both companies specialize in selling hosted software-as-service applications.
Security Is the Top Cloud Concern
Even so, many companies remain skittish about entrusting important tasks to third parties. “It’s a very attractive model, but there will be challenges,” Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd said in a speech in Orlando in October. “It’s unlikely we’d put anything outside the firewall that’s material in nature that we couldn’t 100 percent secure.”
In a recent survey of small business owners conducted for Bloomberg Businessweek.com by the professional social networking site LinkedIn, three-fourths of the…