By: Greg Elliott

Hi, I’m Greg Elliott with 1102 GRAND, Kansas City’s Carrier Hotel and collocation facility. Thanks for taking the time to join me for another podcast, concerning what we’re seeing out there in the collocation industry. Today, I’m going to focus on healthcare IT, specifically the manage service companies that serve doctors offices and healthcare networks.

As healthcare entities start to become more and more engaged with health IT and electronic health records, 1102 GRAND is seeing a growing demand for space in our collocation facilities in a number of ways. One of the first things that we’re seeing, is our current customers are increasing their collocation footprint to accommodate for increased data storage back-ups. These manage service companies work with smaller healthcare offices and function as their IT department. This allows these offices to start complying with mandates set forth in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, without having to hire a full-time IT department or supplement their current IT department with the expertise that they receive from these manage service companies.

Another thing we’re seeing, hospitals and healthcare networks, their traditional data centers may have only access to two or three different carriers or providers.  But at 1102 GRAND, being a carrier hotel we have 24 different carriers or providers, all the way from Tier 1 carriers to local wireless providers. So, as a business grows and changes, they have options for flexibility to choose which carriers or providers best fit their model. Plus, having all those carriers and providers in one place, it tends to keep pricing very competitive. Not to mention, the access or the loop charge goes away in most cases. It can provide quite a bit of cost savings for the organization.

Finally, another benefit that we’re seeing is healthcare networks or hospital data centers choosing an off-site data center facility, so that it frees up resources and space for them to focus on their core business, which of course, is healthcare. They can take advantage of 1102 GRAND’s SAS 70 certification, and we just completed a PCI, ISO and HIPAA (most important to healthcare is the HIPAA piece) readiness audit. We also have redundant power, redundant cooling systems, dual power grids, security and manage services. So, instead of the hospitals or the healthcare networks focusing on taking care of the data center, they leave that to us.

You are here: Home » 1102 GRAND » Podcast with Greg Elliott, Business Development Director of 1102 GRAND, Kansas City’s data center and colocation facility, featuring healthcare IT

Tags: 1102 GRAND, Bandwith, call center, carrier hotel, carrier neutral data facility, Carriers, choosing a data center, Co-location, co-location services, collocation, collocation cross connect, Colo, cooling, Darren Bonawitz, data center, Data Center Cooling, Data Center Journal, Data Center Security, data circuit, data management, Data Suites, efficiency, electricity, filtration, hardware, hardware maintenance, health records, healthcare, heating and cooling, Internet Hub, Internet hub and data center, IT, IT infrastructure, Kansas City data center, LEED, Midwest data center, Midwest Internet hub, overheating, raised floor, recycled water, remote facility, temperature control, VoIP, water, water shortage This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 2:37 pm and is filed under 1102 GRAND, Colocation Information, Data Center Cooling, Data Center Security, Disaster Recovery Solution, Midwest data center, Networking, healthcare it, raised floors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.