StorageCraft optimizing OneXafe solution for healthcare providers
The widely standardized 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 organizations into the petabyte era.
To help healthcare organizations immunize themselves against the resulting triple threat of spiraling 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 optimize 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. Said Ross Hurd, CIO at Lake Chelan Community Hospital, “A one-two punch of data-hungry advances in medical technologies and growing data compliance regulations poses a significant challenge for our IT systems and budgets. StorageCraft presented the means to solve our data challenges of today – and the means to simply and cost-efficiently scale in the future. We now have an easy to manage and exceptionally well-protected data environment in a single solution, that meets our needs for remote replication, file serving data protection, continuous data protection and even protects us from possible exposure to ransomware.”
StorageCraft for Healthcare helps solve the most pressing issues of healthcare-specific data management and protection, including:
Eliminating spiraling data costs: Healthcare organizations are facing unprecedented growth in storage capacity. For example, image archives alone are expanding by as much as 40 percent 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 organizations 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 in-line 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 organizations to immediately recover the most recent version of data, enabling them to thwart a ransomware attack. This feature is of particular value to healthcare organizations considering 45 percent of all ransomware attacks in 2017 were aimed at the healthcare sector.
Insurance policy premiums are lowered: While healthcare organizations 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 dollar value by insurance companies as part of their risk assessments. This can add up to tens of millions of dollars in required coverage. When healthcare organizations 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. Recently, a StorageCraft healthcare customer was looking at a $22 million insurance policy, and, by deploying StorageCraft solutions, the premium was significantly reduced, thus delivering immediate ROI on the deployment of the entire project.
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 organizations 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, optimized for mid-sized healthcare organizations, begins at $63,248 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 $13,995.
“If healthcare practitioners can’t get the patient’s information when they need it, the quality of care could be severely compromised. 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 organizations. 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,” said Shridar Subramanian, Vice President, Product Management and Marketing at StorageCraft.