Remote Backup Solutions for Medical Specialists
Posted on Fri, Aug 07, 2009
Professionals within the medical industry are faced with new advances in technology that generate more electronic data than ever. The obligation to meet strict patient privacy and government compliance standards surrounding data protection has intensified with the shift to electronic medical records. This rapid advancement in digital data growth and government regulations calls for more accountability to protect patient confidentiality through administrative procedures, technology and a thorough offsite data backup and disaster recovery plan. Consequentially, medical professionals are turning to managed service providers that offer secure offsite backup and disaster recovery consulting capabilities. These remote backup companies provide the reliability, recovery time objectives and data security required to ensure patient privacy and business continuity.
Remote backup companies present a broad choice of various cost options according to the amounts and types of data files that need to be stored and protected. A dependable offsite data backup provider should back up several variations of mission-critical documents and allow an organization to carry out a point-in-time recovery in the event of a disaster. Even though there are some documents which change on a consistent basis, there are those medical records that are never altered once initially produced. One case in point: a radiograph or signed certificate will go unchanged years down the line. Therefore, it would be unnecessary to store these files through a remote backup solution which backs up at multiple restore points intermittently.
A practical and low cost alternative would be to move all unchanging and infrequently retrieved data to a lower-cost tier within a tiered storage solution. Consider using an offsite data backup company that provides tiered storage solutions within their disaster recovery services. This data archiving system stores and protects files that never change, such as e-mails, pictures, signed documents, videos and static medical records like x-rays. This is a less expensive resolution than storing data on a higher tier that is not essential for rarely-accessed and invariable data.