Joe Minarik, Chief Operating Officer, DataBank
Healthcare organizations have spent years modernizing clinical technology. All of it depends on one thing: the data center staying online. Here’s what resilient healthcare infrastructure actually looks like.
Healthcare IT leaders have spent years modernizing their infrastructure: migrating to electronic health records, deploying telehealth platforms, integrating remote monitoring devices, connecting imaging systems to clinical workflows, and more. The investment has been substantial, and the results have been meaningful.
Yet all of it depends on one thing: the data center staying online.
This is not a hypothetical concern. Imagine this scenario: healthcare data center infrastructure goes down, even briefly. The consequences could include:
Clinicians losing access to patient recordsMedication administration systems going offlineImaging platforms becoming unavailableDiagnostic results and clinical data unable to be transmitted to outside agencies, specialists, or referring providersClinical staff reverting to paper-based workarounds that slow care delivery and introduce errorPatients waiting for time-sensitive treatment facing delays with real clinical consequences
For healthcare IT leaders, the availability of data center infrastructure isn’t just an IT metric. It’s a patient care responsibility.
The Unique Demands of Healthcare Infrastructure
Data centers responsible for healthcare infrastructure operate under a set of pressures that most enterprise IT environments simply do not face. The data itself is unusually complex: a single patient encounter can generate structured data (lab results, vitals, medication records), unstructured data (physician notes, discharge summaries), and large-format binary data (CT scans, MRIs, pathology images).
In addition, these data types must be stored, retrieved, and transmitted across systems that often weren’t designed to talk to each other. Examples include legacy EHRs, third-party diagnostic platforms, payer systems, and increasingly, remote monitoring devices operating outside the four walls of the hospital.
Regulatory requirements add another layer of complexity. HIPAA mandates not just that data be protected but that it remain available to authorized users when needed. This requirement is just as enforceable as the security provisions and just as consequential when it fails.
The retention challenge is equally demanding. Healthcare records often must be kept for decades, in formats that remain accessible and intact long after the systems that created them have been decommissioned. Few other industries face that kind of storage and data integrity obligation at the same scale.
What the Right Data Center Partner Makes Possible
Every EHR, telehealth platform, remote monitoring device, and imaging system in a modern health system runs on data center infrastructure. Like electricity, data center infrastructure tends to be invisible when it works, and similarly, the consequences of losing it are immediate and serious.
For healthcare IT leaders, that means evaluating partners not just on cost or location, but on the capabilities that directly support clinical continuity. High-availability architecture built on redundant power, cooling, and network connectivity is the foundation. Without it, even the best-designed IT systems are vulnerable to the kind of failures that can quickly ripple through clinical operations.
Geographic footprint is another factor that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. A data center partner with facilities in multiple markets gives healthcare organizations the ability to place infrastructure close enough to clinical operations for fast, low-latency access, while maintaining geographically separate failover sites at a safe distance from any single point of disruption.
Security and compliance frameworks matter just as much. A data center partner operating under established healthcare compliance standards, with physical security, access controls, and audit capabilities built into the environment, reduces the compliance burden on internal IT teams and helps ensure that HIPAA availability and security requirements are met at the infrastructure level.
Storage is another area where the right partner makes a tangible difference. Healthcare data is voluminous, long-lived, and carries strict requirements around retention and access. The right colocation environment gives IT leaders the foundation to store, manage, and access healthcare data at the scale and longevity clinical and regulatory requirements demand.
Perhaps, most visibly, the growth of telehealth and remote patient monitoring has raised the stakes for data center performance. What was once a predictable, campus-based workload now includes continuous data streams from patient homes, mobile devices, and outpatient facilities.
A data center partner with the network infrastructure to support low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity and the capacity to scale as those workloads grow becomes a direct enabler of care delivery, not just a vendor in the stack.
Infrastructure Strategy as Patient Care Strategy
Healthcare organizations have made substantial investments in clinical technology. The return on those investments depends entirely on the infrastructure that supports them. Yet infrastructure strategy is often treated as a back-office concern, resourced reactively, reviewed after something breaks, and disconnected from the clinical priorities it ultimately serves.
That disconnect is where risk accumulates. Achieving the availability, security, compliance, and scalability that healthcare demands requires data center infrastructure that is purpose-built for the job, operated with rigorous processes, and backed by partners who understand what is at stake when systems go down.
For IT leaders, the question isn’t whether the data center matters to patient care. It clearly does. The question is whether your infrastructure strategy, and the partners behind it, reflect that reality.
About Joe Minarik
Joe Minarik is DataBank’s Chief Operating Officer and is responsible for all data center operations, engineering, construction, managed services, and IT operations. He brings extensive cloud and data center expertise from his 16-year tenure at Amazon, where he led infrastructure development and served as Global Head of Data Center Supply.