Steven Giangregorio, VP, Professional Services

More often than not, when I’m discussing professional services work with customers, I’m told that their resources are strapped, that they are focused on too many things and that they can’t get started for a while. Alternatively, I’ve received urgent requests for assistance from panicked hospital IT managers who had discovered that their data protection operations had not been running correctly, and that their data may be at risk.

It seems to be a theme: the IT staff responsible for ensuring the safety of a hospital’s critical enterprise data is often stretched too thin. Data protection of critical hospital systems should never be an afterthought, or something to be addressed when someone “comes up for air.” A disaster in data recovery – the inability to recover – is often considered to be a resume generating event. No one wants to be caught in that situation. Yet I see it happen over and over.

Value of backing up your data and/or risk of not backing up

Hospitals struggle with managing and protecting increasing volumes of both structured and unstructured data that may be located in a central data center or isolated with specific types of PACS data. It’s both challenging and costly to backup and archive all this data, and then develop strategies for timely recovery from the various data stores.

However, any hospital that fails to protect its data is non-compliant with federal law.  Any hospital that cannot restore data in a timely manner risks endangering its patients’ health.  The challenge is to design and implement data protection strategies and methods without incurring a high up-front cost or creating additional burden on IT resources that are already juggling many projects.

Outsourcing hospital data protection

Hospitals do not have to spend big to remain compliant. Data protection services, such as BridgeHead’s RAPid Protect, enable them to get all the benefits of an enterprise-grade data protection system for a monthly fee that includes the software, services and ongoing support needed to keep it running properly. Using both backup and archiving solutions as required, these services ensure that all data – from emails to DICOM data – is completely protected.

Hospitals that outsource their data protection enjoy:

  • Low upfront cost,
  • Luxury of not having to manage the day-to-day service,
  • Improved data protection that comes from expert management.

In addition, the required capacity can be scaled easily as more data is added. Plus, a hospital does not have to invest in additional data protection resources, or it can use the ones it has for other projects.

More and more, senior hospital IT managers are exploring better ways to look after and care for their data protection systems. Solutions that redirect the management of these system away from strapped resources not only frees them up for other work, but also makes sure that all data is in fact properly protected, every day, and that issues are dealt with quickly and with high priority. So even if the hospital staff is capable of handling their own data protection, if they don’t have the time, their entire enterprise is exposed to a risk that could be catastrophic should the worst happen.

For over a year BridgeHead has offered its customers backup and recovery managed services as an add-on service level. For a single monthly fee, BridgeHead bundles this service with the software and installation services required to provide an end-to-end complete data protection solution. BridgeHead will quickly protect a customer’s data, and keep the trains running, day in and day out.

Is your data properly protected? Are you at risk?

Find out more about the BridgeHead RAPid Protect.