Recent hurricanes, floods and other natural calamities have highlighted the importance of disaster preparedness for health care providers across the country. Ensuring the rapid recovery of business-critical IT infrastructures and data has become a priority. Regardless of the cause - whether from data corruption, user error, power outage, hardware failure or natural disaster - prolonged downtime is simply not an option in the health care industry.

For health care providers, quick and reliable access to images, lab data, physician notes, histories, prescriptions and other vital information helps to improve care and save lives. 

The cost of non-compliance
Providing quality medical care today involves implementing a system to access a wide range of electronic health records and documents that can be concurrently used by multiple caregivers wherever and whenever needed. Protecting this information is a pressing concern for health care providers and patients.

Security and privacy provisions for patient information are mandated by a growing range of industry and government regulations, including HIPAA. Additional incentive for proper record-handling is presented through the Joint Commission, which has the authority to award eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement through compliance with its standards for the management of protected health information.

The potential costs of non-compliance can be significant. Fortunately, new approaches to disaster recovery (DR) reduce the cost and complexity of providing protection for this information while also improving the reliability and effectiveness of recovery strategies. With tools that automate the backup and restoration of systems and data, these practical strategies enable health care organizations to meet their disaster recovery objectives while also addressing compliance demands.

System availability
For hospitals, a DR strategy must ensure that both systems and data are available. To that end, the DR process for mission-critical applications must be automated and resilient. Compared with traditional manual recovery processes, high-availability clustering significantly reduces downtime. If a system fails, the software can restart the application automatically on another server, with minimal intervention by IT staff.

Better yet, clustering can take advantage of secondary data center locations so that applications failover to those sites in the event of an outage at the primary site. Clustering frameworks enable failover to heterogeneous server platforms, storage systems and operating systems, thereby obviating the need to maintain expensive hardware that sits idle at either a primary or secondary site. In addition, organizations are leveraging centralized backup and storage management as well as de-duplicated and tiered storage.

Virtualization is also being used as a DR tool. Server virtualization employs virtual machine technology to allow multiple operating systems to run on a single server. Whereas restarting virtual servers at a secondary site used to be a manual process, clustering software now allows organizations to deploy server virtualization and enjoy the same automated disaster recovery benefits as with their physical server environments.

Non-disruptive testing
Best practices stipulate that a DR plan must be tested, revised and updated. With the automated failover capabilities of data-replication and application-clustering tools, IT organizations can test their recovery procedures using a copy of production data without interrupting production, corrupting the data or risking problems when restarting a production application.

By leveraging proven technologies to automate data and application recovery, and provide non-disruptive testing, health care providers can prepare for disasters, minimize downtime and help safeguard the continuity of patient care. HIE

Mr. Lazarus is health care industry solutions manager at Symantec Corp.