The plight of small businesses can sometimes get lost in the hype for the next big thing in cloud-based technologies. But that doesn’t mean the little guys are not experiencing internal transformation in today’s digitized era. In fact, according to Wikibon Inc.’s 2018 predictions, “Digital transformation will remain near the top of 2018 corporate strategies.”

For organizations like non-profit, long-term care provider United Methodist Homes Inc., the move to hosted software as a service applications has meant major changes in the responsibilities for the information technology department, including a service-based approach to troubleshooting employees’ tech-related issues.

Five years ago, United Methodist’s IT team was kept busy maintaining, updating and upgrading on-premises applications and storage for their records and information. Now most of the storage is virtualized, and the company’s electronic medical record is a hosted application.

“[It] has definitely been a shift that now everything is hosted,” said Sue Morrow (pictured), network manager at United Methodist Homes. “We just make sure that our network is up and running and support our users and all of their issues when they break things, flip their screens, drop something …”

Morrow spoke with Stu Miniman (@Stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VTUG Winter Warmer event in Foxborough, Massachusetts, about the changes experienced from United Methodist’s move to cloud-based services and how the company will continue to evolve with increased regulation over data-sharing cloud tools.

Complying with government regulations

While managing employee IT needs is one thing, protecting confidential medical records when outside providers on unknown devices require access is another challenge altogether, according to Morrow.

“We can manage our computers for our employees by pushing out policies and things that are required by the application, [but] when someone comes in from the outside, it isn’t necessarily set up right. So we have that other set of challenges,” she said.

Ensuring United Methodist stays in compliance with the government’s constantly changing healthcare regulations, including maintaining standards for data privacy on hosted application systems as required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a major responsibility for Morrow. This makes being aware of new developments that may affect her field essential for her position.

“Of course we have HIPAA concerns and things like that, which also come into play when you’re talking about cloud hosted, in any hosted application,” Morrow said.

When asked her purpose for being at VTUG, Morrow answered simply, “I’m here for the … networking and keeping current in what’s happening in the industry, in my career.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer.

Photo: SiliconANGLE