Disaster: More than 80 Percent of Hospitals Said “Not Ready”.

A Closer Look at Offsite Data Storage

Some people get paid to worry. They look into the future at scenarios that could occur, scenarios that could wreck their healthcare data, incur a multitude of HIPAA violations, and essentially crumble their organization. Then there are people who get paid to provide the solutions that keep that data secure. Increasingly, providers are looking to offsite data storage as their Plan A for disaster recovery.

Unfortunately, more than 80 percent of hospital IT administrators have no confidence in their current disaster recovery strategy. They believe they will not be prepared to get through an event that could compromise the integrity of their data. Critical care hospitals have an even more drastic situation on their hands due to the fact that they have fewer alternatives because of their limited budgets and personnel.

It’s no secret that the responsibilities placed upon the shoulders of IT professionals in healthcare are quite staggering. There are a variety of government mandates to live up to and gigabytes of patient data to protect and preserve. Regardless of what disaster befalls a provider, the information must be available. Offsite data storage has become a front-runner in efforts to preserve this data and make it available from one provider to the next.

Thankfully, the cloud has become a more viable option for providers in their plans to backup their data. While some IT professionals have trepidations about cloud-based services, the best providers are utilizing top-notch data centers where multiple disaster recovery processes are in place for offsite data storage.

Call it disaster recovery as a service, or just cloud-based archiving, but it is making its presence known in the healthcare industry for more than one reason. One of those reasons is the ability it gives to share data with other departments and/or facilities. One of the issues facing many providers today is that they can’t effectively communicate with other systems. The cloud-based VNA solutions make sharing data easy, yet it’s also a safe and secure platform.

Disaster recovery is also about business continuity. Does the cost to implement a business continuity solution have to be so dramatic? The cost might not be an issue for a system in a large urban center, but what about the small providers in rural areas? They are often the victim of a one-size-fits-all solution that is too costly for their budget. Fortunately, there is an offsite provider of cloud-based disaster recovery and business continuity solutions that fits the budgets of the smallest providers.

OffSite Image Management works with Level IV data centers that have among the best security and disaster recovery safeguards in place. All components in data centers at this level are fully fault tolerant. This includes HVAC systems, servers, storage, chillers and uplinks. Furthermore, everything is dual powered. Using multiple centers to duplicate data means that in the event of a natural disaster in one geographic region, the data stored in a distant region will be safe and secure. What other solution can offer you 99.99 percent availability?