"[Cloud] does compare favorably to tape, when you consider all the costs of tape storage: all the costs include not only buying the tape drive and buying new tapes, but the costs of sending them off-site, the costs of retrieving them, and the real challenge to the cost of tape, how do I make sure I can get back the images I put on the tape five or ten years ago?"

As technology advances, Zierick notes, health care centers have to waste space holding onto old technology that can read old tapes in case they need to be accessed.

While Nirvanix says cautious health care centers have yet to fully embrace the cloud platform, some are starting to warm to it. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a top-ranked academic hospital in Boston, Mass., recently began moving its PACS cardiology images off a DVD jukebox and onto cloud storage.

"The whole benefit of public cloud is that you don't have a huge IT staff. You can have data scale without having to buy the whole data center," says Michael Passe, storage architect for Beth Israel, which incidentally, has a large and well-managed IT staff.

But is it safe?

Although Beth Israel is exploring the clouds, they're doing so cautiously. Passe says they have shoveled around 10 percent of the cardiology PACS onto a cloud service, but it is a private, not a public one. Unlike cloud storage hosted by Amazon, Microsoft or the other big providers, where data from several users inhabit the same data space in centers off-site, private cloud is hosted in-house but can be accessed from any portal on-site. At Beth Israel, it's run using EMC's Atmos product and a privately circuited line leased from Verizon.

It is, Passe says, a way for them to test cloud without really committing themselves to it --- something Passe is, at this stage, reluctant to do. Simply put, Passe considers public clouds too risky.

"For us, because of security and new tech, it made most sense to invest in private," he says.

Security and safety are troubling after several well-publicized health care leaks. According to a recent HIMSS survey, nearly 60 percent of online hacks attack medical record, although in fairness it should be noted that none of the breaches have been in the cloud.

But that doesn't mean it won't happen. "Look, every once in a while someone hacks into a big e-commerce database and steals a bunch of credit cards. Security breaches will occur, and it's 100 percent assured they will occur in the cloud," Kermani warns.

Passe believes the two weakest links are security of transmission and the ability to audit access. In other words, how secure is the data when it leaves the facility, pulsing through fiber optic lines and making its way to the data center, and do you have a paper trail to track whoever has been accessing it?

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