StorageCraft protects healthcare organisations against triple threat
StorageCraft for Healthcare addresses data management cost, complexity and protection challenges for healthcare providers
The widely-standardised use of electronic health records and medical imaging, plus the growth in data-intensive health applications such as wearable technologies and telemedicine, are catapulting even small healthcare organisations into the petabyte era.
To help healthcare organisations immunise themselves against the resulting triple threat of spiralling data costs, system downtime, and loss of data integrity, StorageCraft has introduced StorageCraft for Healthcare, a converged scale-out primary and secondary data platform with integrated data protection.
StorageCraft worked with healthcare solution partners to optimise its recently-introduced OneXafe solution — the industry’s-first converged data platform for both primary and secondary data, and data protection — for the specific requirements of healthcare environments.
Jamie Hissitt, technology consultant at Air-IT, said: “Our healthcare customers cannot tolerate compromise between modernising the patient experience and delivering the best-possible care.
If healthcare practitioners can’t get patient information when they need it, the quality of care could be severely compromised
“As such, their data management solutions have to cost-effectively enable digital workflows that simplify, accelerate and improve the care continuum; all within a completely-protected environment that doesn't get in the way of patient care.
“The converged data management and protection solutions from StorageCraft help us create solutions that answer all these needs."
StorageCraft for Healthcare helps solve the most-pressing issues of healthcare-specific data management and protection, including:
- Eliminating Spiralling data costs: Healthcare organisations are facing unprecedented growth in storage capacity. For example, image archives alone are expanding by as much as 40% annually. StorageCraft for Healthcare delivers comprehensive data management and protection services in a single and easy-to-use solution with seamless integration to disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Healthcare organisations can scale out storage dynamically as their requirements change over time. They can start with a single node cluster and a few terabytes of capacity, then seamlessly and non-disruptively scale to petabyte storage without any configuration or application changes. Additional features include inline variable-length deduplication, compression, encryption at rest, and multi-site remote replication. These features dramatically reduce data footprint and cost while helping to satisfy HIPAA compliance requirements for data protection and disaster recovery
- Malicious threats are thwarted: Because StorageCraft for Healthcare delivers central visibility of all data, it can provide strong encryption along the entire data lifecycle without adding undue management complexity. It also protects information by taking snapshots every 90 seconds. As the object store is immutable, the snapshots and the original data remain completely unaffected in event of attack – such as ransomware. This allows healthcare organisations to immediately recover the most-recent version of data, enabling them to thwart a ransomware attack. This feature is of particular value to healthcare organisations considering 45% of all ransomware attacks in 2017 were aimed at the healthcare sector
- Insurance policy premiums are lowered: While healthcare organisations can look to insurance policies to protect against the financial risk associated with breaches in privacy and data, every medical record is typically assigned a value by insurance companies as part of risk assessments. This can add up to tens of millions of pounds in required coverage. When healthcare organisations can demonstrate they have effective data management and protection strategies in place, these premiums can be reduced because the risk of claims against the coverage is reduced
- Data degradation is contained: Unlike any other vendor, StorageCraft provides a platform that converges both primary and secondary data while also adding integrated data protection. This is of value for healthcare environments because the solution detects ‘silent’ data degradation caused by bit rot. Legacy storage systems store images such as X-rays to a picture archiving and communication system and may not detect if data has been compromised. As a result, the information read from the legacy storage system may be corrupt and unusable. This does not happen with StorageCraft for Healthcare, making it an important asset for healthcare organisations where fast and unhindered access to data can make the difference between life and death
- Configuration, pricing and availability: A complete OneXafe converged scale-out data protection solution, optimised for mid-sized healthcare organisations, begins at £57,631 for 120TB. It includes all software, hardware, and data protection services for an unlimited number of virtual and physical servers. A OneXafe scale-out storage solution starts at £12,535.
Shridar Subramanian, vice president of product management and marketing at StorageCraft, said: “If healthcare practitioners can’t get patient information when they need it, the quality of care could be severely compromised.
Our healthcare customers cannot tolerate compromise between modernising the patient experience and delivering the best-possible care
“That means data management and protection is an absolute must.
“A scale-out converged primary and secondary data platform with integrated data protection is a game-changer for healthcare organisations.
“This is especially true for medium-size healthcare practices and hospitals that face the same data challenges as large healthcare providers, but have far fewer resources and smaller budgets at their disposal.
“In a single, easy-to-manage and massively-scalable environment, StorageCraft for Healthcare is a complete data management and protection solution that cost effectively solves the budget, management and risk challenges of explosive data growth."
