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Telstra cloudwhacks storage vendors' sweet spot

Cloudy medical image library is bad news for big storage

Australia's dominant telco, Telstra, has waded into one of the storage industry's favourite markets, medical imaging, with a cloud service that may not make it a lot of friends.

The overwhelming majority of medical imaging is now digital, so the field generates lots and lots of data. Much of that data needs to be retained for ages, which storage vendors appreciate greatly*. Medical images also need to be easily accessible because everyone in the health care community is tired of schlepping films and photos around between medical practitioners. These days the ideal scenario is for a patient to have all their images online, so that practitioners can access them easily and medicos with special skill can see more images. Another scenario that makes digital medical images compelling is a weekend away on which you suffer an injury and get a scan in a country hospital. Putting that image online image means it is available to your city doctor without any hassle.

Little wonder the storage industry loves medical imaging.

But if ever there was an application for which cloud is a good solution, medical imaging is it: maintaining storage kit need not be a medical imager's core business if someone can do it centrally, as-a-service and with the lower costs that come with scale.

Which is just what Telstra announced yesterday in the form of a service that promises to store and provide access to images captured on any medical imaging device. 70-facility imaging outfit Capital Radiolology has signed for four years of the service. More will likely come and as they do will also likely find their SANs and NAS devices aren't needed any more. And as those ethernet cables plugs are pulled from their sockets for the last time, some of the storage industry's best customers will disconnect too.

It's not all bad news for the storage industry as someone will score a big, big win with Telstra. The industry's also had time to prepare for this, as there are already other cloud services of this sort in the market. But Telstra backing such a service brings the battle into the backyard of storage firms' Australian outposts. And also into the backyard of storage vendor's local ecosystems, where resellers, consultants and others who work with medical imaging now face the biggest, strongest, competitor Australia has to offer. ®

*The Register is aware of an Australian state government organisation required to keep all employment records for a century. Anyone who ever works for the government and injured at work might conceivably have a future action, it's reckoned. Lots of people work for the government. And if they worked in a building later found to contain a contaminant like asbestos, all those employees might later have an action. Keeping records to hand for one hundred years has therefore become policy.

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