With the arrival of hurricane season, hospitals must ensure for real-time data availability even in the wake of a natural disaster

Today’s hospitals and health systems are benefitting from an explosion of information technology to improve patient care, run their facilities and keep costs contained.

As the industry transitions to a data-driven healthcare infrastructure, the influx of information generated continues to increase at a rapid pace with no sign of slowing down. And with this escalation comes a growing dependency on reliable access to this information in real-time. While prospects for a busy 2018 hurricane season were recently downgraded, natural disasters still have the potential to inflict tremendous amounts of damage if a single storm makes landfall, reinforcing the need for an effective disaster avoidance strategy for hospitals of all shapes and sizes.

The ramifications of lost data from a disaster are significant to any organization; and in the case of hospital and health systems, data loss can ultimately have life or death consequences. Downtime is not an option as data can be critical to patient outcomes. Additional liabilities come in the form of lost organizational credibility or risked reputations. On the financial side alone, the economic repercussions related to the loss of patient data (and associated downtime) have the potential to cripple a hospital. According to the Ponemon institute, unplanned downtime at a healthcare organization can cost an average of $7,900 per minute.

2018’s ‘always-on’ healthcare environments cannot afford time-intensive recovery, back-up and restoration processes, making the need for a highly-effective disaster recovery process more critical than ever before. So how should hospitals and health systems go about preparing for a natural disaster in order to ensure that the data required for patient care is always available and secure? Having a comprehensive strategy in place to cover all the aspects of minimizing the impact is an important first step.

Specifically, healthcare organizations need to understand how data is handled and recovered. The only way to protect against the potential for downtime is to mirror data, transparently, automatically and in real-time. Increasingly, software-defined storage is being relied upon as a secure, cost-effective solution to enable business continuity, high availability, and disaster recovery.

A software-defined storage solution with disaster recovery capabilities (ideally one with synchronous mirroring) is an ideal option for data protection, ensuring that hospital information is always available, no matter how catastrophic the issue. With automatic failover and failback, the need for human intervention to restore data and applications is removed, eliminating the impact on hospitals in the event that their infrastructure is down, damaged or destroyed.

With this approach, physically separate storage nodes, each in a different failure domain, provide a level of availability that highly reliable hardware alone simply cannot match. If one of the nodes is impacted, the other node(s) continue to provide data access to applications. By removing the dependency on any one site, data resources and functionalities are quickly safeguarded. If disaster strikes and a data center location becomes inoperable, data has been replicated to a disaster recovery site (either another physical location or the cloud) to enable hospital operations continue undisturbed or to be quickly restored following an outage.

Protecting valuable patient data will remain a top challenge and looming threat for healthcare executives for the foreseeable future. Unexpected natural disasters that risk data access and integrity are on the rise and are largely indiscriminate, impacting healthcare providers of all sizes. Hospitals should no longer question if a data protection solution makes sense but rather when that need will become clear and how quickly an organization can be up and running again. By taking a proactive approach to identifying perils related to data-loss and ensuring that the proper storage infrastructure is in place to allow for both safeguarding data and, if necessary, restoration, healthcare organizations can better protect themselves from the downtime-related clinical, financial and reputational risks that they face every day.

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