Free whitepaper explains that an effective Healthcare Disaster Recovery strategy is dependent on a solid understanding of a hospital’s applications and data

Ashtead, UK and Woburn, MA, USA – August 25, 2010 – BridgeHead Software today released a whitepaper on Healthcare Disaster Recovery that offers an integrated strategy to address the uniquely complex data and storage management issues healthcare providers must consider as they develop hospital-wide backup and recovery policies. Available for download, the whitepaper details why disaster recovery (DR) is different in healthcare and, therefore, requires a different treatment when compared to disaster recovery in other industries.

As the whitepaper explains, the data landscape in the healthcare industry is more complex than it is in the vast majority of other industrial and commercial sectors. This intricate environment results primarily from the varied data types – namely structured, unstructured and semi-structured – which are generated by both clinical and administration systems. The paper goes on to reveal that the type of data being secured and protected is inextricably linked to how that data needs to be recovered. It also outlines how IT professionals can reduce their backup burden by as much as 70 to 80 per cent.

“For many hospitals, the sheer volume of data being generated is preventing them from successfully protecting and securing their patient and administrative information,” said Tony Cotterill, Chief Executive of BridgeHead Software. “Understanding the unique characteristics of healthcare data is the first step to implementing an effective backup and disaster recovery strategy that will reliably ¬bring a hospital’s information back online within minutes and hours, rather than hours and days, after a disaster, systems outage, corruption or loss.”

BH MediSafe Helps Meet Hospital DR Requirements
BH MediSafe from BridgeHead Software is a flexible, modular approach that solves a pressing healthcare IT issue: that of implementing a DR strategy that can reliably and realistically deal with the massive upsurge in data demands, now and into the future.

When implemented as the foundation to a DR strategy, BH MediSafe uses a combination of traditional backup and archive to fully protect data and improve the recovery process in the event of outage, corruption or loss. BH MediSafe protects healthcare information by first analysing whether the data is “static” (unlikely to be accessed or changed again) or “dynamic” (regularly accessed and likely to change), then protecting it accordingly. Since it selectively moves static data into a fully protected archive, the traditional backup of the dynamic content is optimised and data recovery both at the file and the system level is vastly improved.

BH MediSafe allows healthcare organisations to:
•   Understand their data, which leads to a more effective data protection and DR policy;
•   Reduce backup windows and improve system administration efficiency by identifying static content and moving it to self-protecting repositories;
•   Create a single management system for protecting static and dynamic data;
•   Improve single-item restore coupled with full and efficient protection against “once in a lifetime” disasters;
•   Make protected data available for secondary or research use;
•   Achieve ROI via its multitasking capabilities.

“While healthcare organisations are generating new data at a dizzying pace, a full 80 per cent of hospital information is static data that, after 14 months, may never be accessed again,” said Tony Cotterill. “By significantly reducing the amount of data to be replicated and moving static information onto low cost archives, BH MediSafe helps healthcare organisations implement DR strategies that set and meet realistic Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) goals.”