Being able to automate IT processes is the next big step forward for organizations, like Boston Children’s Hospital, as they look to drive research and improve patient outcomes. In this article we share the benefits that Boston Children’s Hospital has gained by investing in an open, scalable, and shareable platform to support researchers and clinicians.
2020 has been a pivotal year for digital transformation. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the need for digital transformation like few events have done before, shared Jason Corey, the Senior Director for Emerging Technologies at Red Hat. “People recognize now the more you can automate technologies to do things on their own, the quicker you can adapt – and in these times adaptation is really the key,” he said.
For Boston Children’s Hospital, automation means agentless IT configuration automation across environments and repeatable delivery for research-based applications. According to Dr. Ellen Grant, the Director of Fetal and Neonatal Neuroimaging Research at Boston Children’s, “…we are able to create an open, scalable and shareable platform capable of reducing the time it takes to analyze key images from hours to minutes.”
In order to deliver automated and timely analysis of data, Boston Children’s is making use of training and delivering machine learning models. By training models to “learn” about patterns in images of the brain, clinicians and researchers are able to automate the discovery of patterns to provide more timely decisions.
Other academic and research institutions are creating automated workflows from DevOps using enterprise open source software, which allows them to focus on application delivery rather than IT provisioning and packaging. By identifying repeatable items of work in a delivery value stream like automated builds and configuration management, more timely submission and triaging of support tickets, organizations are able to deliver faster with more consistency.
“Enterprise open source technologies bring a higher level of security and support to our deployments, allowing us to free up time for continual innovation towards student success and research administrations DevOps,” said Rachel Moorehead, Executive Director of Infrastructure and Operations, University of Alabama Birmingham.
“Everything we touch now is software, and that really is what is driving the rise of how agile can be applied to this [open source philosophy]. Such great software has been developed by these same methodologies, now people are really opening up the aperture of ‘how can these be applied to other areas of the organization and drive in that adaptability?’” shared Corey.
Interested in learning more about the rise of enterprise open source technologies? Check out Red Hat’s blog post here.
This article originally appeared on Today’s Modern Educator on November 19, 2020.
