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Back up your data

Disaster Recovery vs. Live Archive

 

Data backup is must today.  With the increased chance of computer viruses or corrupted data, we need to protect the computer data that’s so vital to our businesses.   From accounting, to patient information, to digital x-rays, a data loss in any of these areas can lead to lost revenue, lost client trust, and may have legal ramifications.

To prevent such loss, digital imaging clients are using 2 types of data back up: Disaster Recovery and Live Archive.

Disaster recovery is an industry buzz word for an offsite data backup.  Wikipedia defines it as:

Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_recovery)

While data backup protects information from viruses and corruption, disaster recovery also protects against the big three of: fire, theft, and flood.  God forbid but if something catastrophic happened at the clinic you’d want the data far away in a protected environment.  It would still be a pain to reload all the data back onto new hardware (which could take weeks) but, at least you haven’t lost any critical information.  A Live Archive however addresses the former issue. 

Recovering data after a disaster is time consuming, again sometimes taking weeks – a live archive fixes this.  It is essentially a virtual “duplicate” of your digital image PACS server (not just the images) offsite.  If a disaster should occur rendering the onsite server inoperable, the user would simply point the local workstation to the live archive and have access to historic data immediately!  Rather than waiting weeks to access data, the downtime effect of a PACS server disaster would be negligible. 

We’ve experienced that downtime is by far the most expensive dilemma for our customers.  While disaster recovery can be as simple as backing up images to a CD and storing them at home or even contracting with local IT to backup images on their server – both fall short of the speed and integrity of a live archive.  It’s imperative to at least have a disaster recovery backup but, if downtime is unacceptable, nothing matches the uptime of a live archive.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at 10:19 am and is filed under Service4Life Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.



2 Responses to “Back up your data”

  1. Jake Says:

    April 1st, 2010 at 10:29 am

    HIPAA Note

    Probably should explain the “legal ramifications” comment a bit. HIPAA compliance for medical clinics may fall under these citations under HIPAA Security Rule Standard Implementation Specification:

    164.308(a)(7)(ii)(A)Data Backup Plan
    164.308(a)(7)(ii)(B)Disaster Recovery Plan
    164.308(a)(7)(ii)(C)Emergency Mode Operation Plan
    164.308(a)(7)(ii)(D)Testing and Revision Procedures
    164.308(a)(7)(ii)(E)Applications and Data Criticality Analysis
    164.310(a)(2)(i)Contingency Operations
    164.310(d)(2)(iv)Data Backup and Storage
    164.312(a)(2)(ii) Emergency Access Procedure

  2. David Kulick Says:

    April 5th, 2010 at 4:20 pm

    As was cleanly pointed out in this post, there are many ways to back up your digital data. Initially it is not uncommon to try and save some money and to purchase a RAID1 or RAID5 server, however, this in itself does not address the “offsite” requirement of protecting your data. An excellent article describing this in more detail has been previously posted on the Animal Insides Website:

    http://www.animalinsides.com/learn/digital-imaging/176-mirrored.html

    Burning CD’s/DVD’s/external hard drives is an expensive solution, however, someone must take on this responsibility to do this on a timely and routine basis and even then older data may not be accessible when trying to perform historical data comparison. A live archive all happens behind the scenes on a daily basis and eliminates the human requirement for data backup.



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