American Medical Association (AMA), a large US healthcare industry interest group, is changing its data center strategy from using an in-house model to an outsourced one.

Chicago-based AMA hired consulting and managed-services company YJT Solutions to help it refresh its IT systems and move them to a third-party colocation facility outside of downtown Chicago, YJT said earlier this week.

Ron Gilliat, AMA’s CIO, said technology had become an integral element of everything the association did.

“That dependence drives higher order requirements for performance and availability,” he said. “The AMA has partnered with YJT for all aspects of the data center migration from technical infrastructure design and build-out, application migrations, program management, and vendor management.”

Mike Sanzo, the project’s principal architect, said locating the data center outside of downtown and physically separating the association’s staff from it will reduce its vulnerability to disaster, but also reduce costs and position the association for the future.

Chicago-based YJT’s clients are in the trading and financial-services industry. In addition to large-scale infrastructure modernization projects like the one it is doing for the AMA, the company provides automated hardware and software systems monitoring, maintenance and service desk support.