Blake Smith of CHRISTUS Health, recently joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante during EMC World 2015 to talk about his company’s journey into the digital world. Smith is the System Director for Enterprise Infrastructure.

The conversation started with an overview of opportunities in the healthcare IT market. Smith mentioned that the dropping cost of infrastructure was creating a new area to explore. He also noted that while there is a strong interest in the Cloud, regulatory concerns make healthcare companies wary about losing control over their data.

“One of the biggest challenges with the data is ensuring that you encrypt it in the Cloud, that you own it and that you can extract it if necessary,” Smith said.

Saving capital by consolidating

Consolidation of its data assets has been one of CHRISTUS Health’s major concerns. By slimming down into two primary data centers, they’ve realized a big savings. This has allowed them to invest in Cloud technologies and a robust virtual infrastructure.

Consolidation also meant bringing together a number of different products. This integration process has proved to be a complicated transition, with different products running on their own release cycles and performance requirements. Smith said the company was very interested in EMC Corp.’s services that could could help smooth that integration. “That is absolutely the hardest challenge we have facing us right now,” he said.

A future in the Cloud

Looking forward, Smith said the company’s first goal was to develop a fully deployed Cloud infrastructure. It is also planning to improve its data protection system by expanding a new recovery technology to its entire site. Finally, CHRISTUS Health adopted XtremIO and is now experimenting with the possibilities it offers.

John Furrier closed the interview by asking what lessons were learned from the journey to the digital world. Smith’s answer came down to something a lot more important than technology. He praised the people involved. “You’ve got to have a strong partner, in this case EMC and VMware,” he said. “And, also, you’ve got to hire champions, and you’ve got to put champions in the roles where they can do the best they can.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2015.