As healthcare IT leaders modernize their Epic electronic health records infrastructure, the focus must shift beyond simple storage upgrades to a balance of uptime, performance and cyber recovery. CDW research highlights that AI and security improvements are helping IT teams manage risk, but the underlying systems require deliberate planning. Epic now connects with imaging, analytics and clinical workflows, meaning the infrastructure beneath it is central to care delivery. This means modernization must go beyond a conventional refresh; over the next three to five years, CIOs must handle uptime, consistent performance, cyber recovery and cost control all at once.
Defining Requirements for Availability and Latency
Infrastructure modernization plans should start with measurable requirements for application availability and latency, not just storage capacity. When a clinician opens a chart or documents patient care, the system must respond consistently. If it does not, patient care and staff productivity suffer. The right infrastructure reduces maintenance events that threaten access. Nondisruptive upgrades and technology refreshes allow organizations to add capacity or replace components without migrating data or scheduling lengthy outages.
Experts recommend establishing service-level objectives around Epic and its dependencies, then monitoring performance during peak clinical demand. New Jersey-based Atlantic Health System needed to replace legacy storage that could not meet Epic’s performance and security requirements while providing uninterrupted access to clinical systems and protecting patient data from cyberattacks. The health system deployed Everpure FlashArray with an Evergreen//Forever subscription to support Epic, virtual desktops, laboratory systems, medical imaging and other production workloads, while FlashBlade, Commvault and immutable SafeMode snapshots strengthened backup and recovery.
Choosing Between Public Cloud and On-Premises
The choice between public cloud and on-premises infrastructure is rarely simple. Cloud platforms offer rapid provisioning, geographic flexibility and scalable access to analytics and AI services. On-premises systems can provide predictable performance, low latency and local data control. Rather than choosing one environment for everything, health systems can place workloads where they fit best. This allows for a hybrid architecture where Epic production stays on-premises while the cloud handles development, testing, analytics or disaster recovery.
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This division preserves responsiveness for clinical applications while giving IT teams flexibility for workloads with variable demand. Placement decisions should reflect clinical criticality, latency requirements, recovery objectives, data sensitivity and demand variability. The approach mirrors Epic’s isolated recovery environment (IRE) model, where production services run on-premises while data is replicated to a segregated cloud or secondary environment. This setup provides immutable snapshots, replication and regular recovery testing to bring essential EHR functions back safely after a cyber incident.
Measuring Readiness and Building a Sustainable Roadmap
Modernization results should be assessed through total cost of ownership, uptime, response times and recovery performance. CIOs must also evaluate whether data is accessible, protected and movable across environments. Legacy refresh cycles often create sharp increases in capital spending, followed by migration costs and repeated capacity planning exercises. Kopinski suggests comparing costs across the expected life of the environment rather than emphasizing the initial purchase price.
Everpure’s Evergreen//One provides a cloudlike consumption model intended to align infrastructure spending with required capacity and services. This approach gives CFOs greater budget clarity and CIOs a more sustainable roadmap while reducing infrastructure changes that could disrupt clinical teams. However, the transition requires more than technical upgrades. Epic touches too many workflows and adjacent systems for modernization to remain solely an IT project. It requires participation from clinicians, nurses, administrative staff, infrastructure teams, security leaders and informatics executives to succeed.
Preparing for the Unexpected
Healthcare organizations must build an isolated recovery path that creates a minimal viable EHR to support patient care during a cyber event. This does not necessarily require a full migration to the cloud. Recovery planning should identify the minimum applications, data and integrations needed to continue care and establish who can authorize restoration. Testing is required to confirm that recovered data is clean and usable. Infrastructure that can adapt to these scenarios will offer the stability healthcare providers need in an increasingly complex digital market.