Ming Chu
Healthcare IT and Machine Learning Researcher
Bozeman, Montana
by Ming Chu
On October 29, 2025, Azure Cloud Service went down.
Not a small slowdown.
A full outage across multiple regions.
In the same month, AWS also had a major outage.
Different provider, different cause, same message:
No cloud is unbreakable.
This is why we design for storms, not just sunny days.
For us in healthcare IT, everything shook.
Epic access was gone.
Microsoft tools froze.
Services we depend on every day stopped responding.
It reminded me how much of our work rests on what we cannot see.
And how fragile it becomes when everything is placed in one place.
Cloud is powerful.
It scales fast, updates quietly, and supports the hospital well.
But outages like this show a simple truth:
Cloud only is convenient, but it is not complete.
When everything lives in one platform, one failure can pause everything.
That morning made it clear again why hybrid matters.
A hospital needs more than one place to stand.
That is why healthcare IT needs to use Hybrid Cloud.
Hybrid Cloud is simple:
A private cloud, the systems we control in our own datacenter.
And a public cloud, like Azure or AWS, that gives us scale and speed.
Together they provide what neither can give alone.
Security and control from the private side.
Flexibility, resilience, and capacity from the public side.
Hospitals choose Hybrid Cloud because patient care cannot depend on one location or one vendor.
Hybrid is not a buzzword.
It is stewardship.
It protects care when storms come.
“Everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, is like a wise man who built his house upon a rock.
And the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house;
and it did not fall, for it was founded upon a rock.”
Matthew 7:24–25
The wise man did not build on one surface.
He built on a foundation that could take storms and stand firmly.
He built on what lasts.
That is hybrid.
Build with layers.
Build with readiness.
Build with wisdom, not ease.
The outage was a storm.
And storms reveal foundations.
We do not control the cloud.
We do not control outages.
But we can build in a way that keeps patient care steady when the world shakes.
It is the same in life.
Do not build everything on one fragile hope.
Build on the Rock.
Prepare before the storm, not after.
If this helps one person think more clearly about system design,
or reminds someone to build on something solid,
then it has done its work.
Technology will fail.
The world will shake.
But wisdom is preparing before trouble comes.
Serve with knowledge.
Serve with understanding.
Serve with a foundation that stands.