Main Line Health Goes with SunGard for Managed Services

In a move intended to maximize the effectiveness of its limited IT staff, non-profit health system Main Line Health has awarded a contract for managed services to SunGard Availability Services. Under the agreement, SunGard will manage the Mail Line Health’s IT infrastructure and provide remote support across Philadelphia-area hospitals. Here’s the deal.

As part of the contract, SunGard will host and manage over 500 Main Line Health servers at one of their local data centers, while also remotely monitoring the health of their network as a whole. This frees up Main Line Health’s IT staff to focus more on what the press release says is their top priority, delivering clinical data to the point of care.

Main Line Health says they investigated other options, including building and maintaining their own data center, but SunGard already had the infrastructure in place, and can guarantee the data availability and uptime they need to do their jobs. For SunGard’s part, they already have experience delivering managed services in the health care vertical.

To me, this news is a textbook example of why companies need MSPs. It might have been Main Line Health and their two-dozen-plus hospitals, but it could have been any business in any industry and the reasons for needing managed hosting and services would have been the same.

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