As health IT grows in scope and variety, providers are struggling to store, manage and secure vast amounts of data and figure out how to integrate all that information with multiple applications, according to Hitachi Data Systems. "Right now, the explosion of data in healthcare is unstructured medical data, not block data," Hitachi's Bill Burns tells Healthcare IT News. "All of this unstructured, messy data is hard to move around and back up. And, having trouble accessing it means providers will have a hard time getting a wide, accurate view of a patient's medical history," he adds. Cloud computing is one option for assuring there's enough space to store everything, but that path presents challenges in terms of security and aggregation of data--distinct from data storage. Article