Using Cloud-Based Solutions for Disaster Recovery
It should be on the minds of everyone who relies on data to do their jobs effectively – disaster
recovery. It’s critical to have a variety of situations that can occur. What disaster recovery plans do you have for your medical images?
Unexpected power outages, natural disasters, fire, technical glitches and human error are some of the most common culprits that can keep a system down for weeks at a time. Some healthcare providers will store their images on CDs and/or external hard drives, but if they don’t have the system support to view the images, this backup method won’t help when an image is desperately needed.
Storage volumes continue to rise as newer technology pushes image sizes larger and larger. A typical high-quality chest X-ray might have a file size of around 20mb, but can be compressed into a 8mb file. However, most large hospitals can store around 300gb of images per day, which is incredibly expensive to maintain. And with more people requesting newer imaging tests, it’s easy to see how storage alone is going to be an issue. Can you imagine a system where someone is in charge of burning 300gb of medical images onto compact discs every day as their backup?
Even for small, rural providers that do their imaging in-house, the file sizes are difficult to contend with in-house. Fortunately, there is a resolution for the problem that works for hospitals small and large. Its’ called cloud-based image management.
The right cloud-based vendors are using Level IV data centers, storing images on dual clustered servers that are backed up to continuous redundant media. Should one data center have a failure of any kind, the data will still be available through a secondary data center that is geographically disparate. These are vendors using end-to-end, 128-bit encryption for file transfers, which means all data will be secure during transfer.
The best vendors are utilizing solutions that allow for real-time data replication and point-in-time recovery. One of the biggest draws to this type of technology is that it boasts 99.9 percent uptime.
At OffSite Image Management, Inc., we are one of the industry-leading vendors for cloud-based technology. We not only replicate data, we backup the clients’ entire system and any existing PACS on the market. Furthermore, we can replicate and store any DICOM data. Our storage methods are non-proprietary, which means data doesn’t require a specific brand of viewer to be seen. We also offer free data migration to any PACS destination.
Users enjoy the seamless solution that guarantees business continuity when they partner with us. We don’t put limits on exams and we offer an easy setup and implementation process.
For more information, contact us today and we’ll go over with you the 360-solutions that will provide the kind of disaster recovery you’ve been looking for in your planning.