C2C and BridgeHead Partner
To bring email into ‘one stop' healthcare data archiving and management solution
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on May 12, 2009 at 3:42 pmA new partnership between C2C and BridgeHead Software signals the creation of a single, comprehensive solution for healthcare data archiving and management by incorporating email archiving into a system that already accommodates files, scanned patient documents, DICOM’ medical images and Microsoft SharePoint data.
As part of the OEM agreement, the two companies are integrating C2C’s award winning Archive One for Exchange email archiving product into BridgeHead’s healthcare archiving and data management suite which enables institutions to reduce storage costs, enhance their disaster recovery process and create a single secure and protected ‘one stop’ data source. This single archive repository can now retain much of the structured and unstructured data that is required for the complete Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR).
The new solution will be marketed and sold as BH MailStore, and will be available exclusively through BridgeHead’s Value Added Reseller partners worldwide.
“By integrating email into our archive platform we can now give healthcare institutions a complete, one source solution for Healthcare Data Management (HDM). In these times when saving costs is critical, HDM optimizes the use of resources by allowing all data types to share the same back end storage and increases the effective capacity of those resources by cutting out duplication and compressing the result.” said Tony Cotterill, CEO of BridgeHead Software.
“Email systems today represent important business and patient related transactions and like all the other data we currently archive, they contain information that is vital to the smooth running of the organisation. As such email is yet another data type that institutions need to manage, protect, and have cost effectively available over the long term,” explained Cotterill. “Partnering with C2C gives us access to Exchange archiving and retention products with a worldwide reputation and credibility. This addition to our suite of products significantly enhances our ability to ingest, manage and present much of the key data that is required by today’s healthcare institution.”
Commenting on the partnership, Brian Babineau, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group said: “Doctor – patient communication, amongst other provider generated e-mail is a vital part of an EHR and should be retained appropriately. As more caregivers turn to this medium, storage costs will grow, messaging application servers will slow, and compliance challenges will arise. This agreement enables customers to address these issues along with other healthcare data management challenges with solutions from a single vendor, which on its own, has immeasurable benefits.”
MailStore will automatically move inactive email data from primary storage systems into an archive repository residing on a range of secondary media, including low cost disk, CAS storage and off line media.
By reducing data volumes held on Tier 1 storage, the system will help cut storage hardware spend while permitting faster backups that tie up fewer IT resources. The reduction in backup volumes will allow restores to be completed more quickly in the event of disaster.
“Data that is moved into the MailStore archive will no longer require frequent backups because it is automatically copied to multiple media at multiple locations. Essentially we create a self protecting archive for this critical data,” explained Cotterill.
BridgeHead’s archiving infrastructure catalogues and indexes data before it is placed within the repository, allowing users to perform sophisticated content and metadata searches. It also enables the creation of detailed management policies to control the data in line with compliance, corporate governance or operational requirements. Rules can be defined on issues such as data retention periods, protection, encryption, access rights and final deletion at end of life.
“The agreement with BridgeHead means Archive One will be integrated with industry-leading products for health and medical organizations for a well engineered, fully tested solution to help organizations reduce costs, control risks and decrease the management time for working with email data,” said Dave Hunt, CEO at C2C. “It’s gratifying to receive the endorsement of another vendor, particularly BridgeHead Software, which understands data management and archiving solutions are critical and sees fit to market Archive One as their own product.”
MailStore will be available as a point solution to manage email archiving, or as part of BridgeHead Software’s modular healthcare data management offering allowing it to be incorporated within a larger archive that includes a wide range of unstructured data from other applications.