With six facilities in operation and 600 health-care professionals, Closing the Gap Healthcare Group Inc. (CTG), wanted to ensure that its patient data was accessible from any location at any time. And, using agile and scalable technology would allow CTG to grow its operations, and according to president and CEO Connie Clerici, build "a publicly-funded health-care system that is sustainable for Canadians both now and in the future."

But besides data accessibility, security and control of patient information was also a priority for CTG. "[Data security] is the fear of every IT manager who wonders where is this stuff and how secure is it," said Rob Myhill, CEO with ThinDesk Inc., the Markham, Ont.-based IT managed services provider that CTG is using.

The offering, ThinDesk Thin Computing, entails thin clients on the desktop and HP virtualized VMware servers that are housed in Telus' SAS 70 data centre for security and real-time collaboration of data. Last July, ThinDesk became Telus' sole partner offering a fully-managed outsourced IT service.

Actually, Myhill thinks that the next decade will see aggressive moves around regulatory compliance, which in turn will mean a renewed focus on data security and better control over that data.

But while the concept of central computing became a big buzz word in the early 2000s especially after the fiasco around Enron and other companies, Myhill said "with the [current] financial crisis, the word that comes out in North America is the lack of regulation that has allowed this to happen."