Going Offsite for Better Scalability and Continuity Efficiency
Hoping for the best should never trump planning for the worst. Where medical imaging is concerned, disaster recovery efforts ensure that the images will always be available, regardless of the natural or man-made disaster occurring in the vicinity of a provider’s system. With the right disaster recovery strategy in place, an organization’s scalability and continuity skills are airtight.
The essence of disaster discovery is simply taking the necessary steps to keep operations afloat in the event of a national emergency, local natural disaster, or acute system failure. These necessary steps include restoring servers or mainframes with data that’s backed up remotely, and re-establishing PBX or LANs. Another way to address scalability and continuity with disaster recovery is to partner with an offsite vendor that backs up all data remotely in a top-notch data center.
When addressing business continuity, most organizations aim at keeping their mission-critical functions in place regardless of what’s happening locally. Business continuity planning involves looking at long term challenges and day to day challenges. A smart planning process involves looking at potential problems as well. This can be anything from malware risks to changes within the makeup of the IT staff. Some organizations today are partnering with an offsite vendor that relies on remote IT staff, allowing the provider’s IT department to manage local needs while letting the vendor’s staff manage the remote system that holds all the provider’s data.
A disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan are interchangeable in many respects, and have even been referred to as a business process contingency plan. All plan how an organization will deal with potential disasters. Natural disasters can’t be prevented, but what can be controlled is a provider’s approach to how they deal with a natural disaster to maintain control over data. Regardless of what you call it, disaster recovery is increasingly important. For providers that keep all their data on local servers, there are obvious limitations to their ability to access this data should a natural disaster strike locally.
To gain more assurance that data will always be available, healthcare IT professionals are looking to vendors who store data in multiple sites in different geographical locations. For instance, a provider located in New Orleans could partner with a vendor that has data centers in the Midwest and the Northwest, which means a natural disaster, such as an earthquake occurring in the Northwest wouldn’t affect the duplicated data being stored in the Midwest.
OffSite Image Management, Inc. is a company focused on providing the healthcare industry with quick and efficient access to medical images and HL7 data, regardless of what disasters befall the region in which they are located. Organizations focused on scalability and continuity are in good hands with OffSite’s multiple Level IV data centers, where disaster recovery protocols are among the most rigorously tested of any data center. To find out more about our process, contact us today.