Iron Mountain Delivers Enhanced Cloud Storage

Iron Mountain Incorporated announced an enhanced version of its Digital Record Center for Medical Images, a cloud storage service for backing up and archiving digital medical information. Now offering greater levels of flexibility, scalability, access and security, the new hybrid cloud service adds an optional onsite storage component to complement its existing cloud service. The combination allows healthcare organizations to configure the service to meet their specific access and disaster recovery requirements.

Today, healthcare organizations face the challenges of managing explosive data growth while ensuring access and control over information that originates in different silos but is needed across their organizations. Tighter federal and industry regulations, along with shrinking IT budgets, have led healthcare organizations to re-evaluate how they store, access and protect their critical patient data, while preparing for the transition to electronic health record systems.

The Iron Mountain Digital Record Center for Medical Images addresses these enterprise storage needs by providing a single cloud storage service for both backup and archiving. The medical imaging service provides secure and accessible storage via a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, so customers pay for only what they need and avoid the large capital expenses required for long-term storage solutions. In addition, by providing a ‘hybrid’ onsite and offsite storage model, the Digital Record Center for Medical Images ensures fast access to onsite images and a quick recovery in the event of a disaster. This frees up both valuable storage bandwidth and physical space that hospitals can repurpose for clinical operations. The result is increased revenue, improved workflow and quality patient care.

The new version of the Digital Record Center
for Medical Images offers these new capabilities:

• New Service Options – three service plans for meeting organizations’ unique needs for protection and redundancy: Mirrored Cloud, storing two copies of each medical image offsite; Hybrid Cloud, storing one copy onsite and one offsite; and Hybrid Cloud2, storing a single copy onsite and two copies offsite.
• Data Shuttle Service – allows organizations to move large volumes of data to Iron Mountain’s data center faster than they could over the Internet.
• Optional Onsite Storage – in addition to cloud storage, a copy of archived data can also be stored onsite, enabling local access to archived data while providing a second copy for disaster recovery purposes.

"In this economy, we all have to do more with less, and we needed a solution that could address security, privacy and disaster recovery requirements that kept costs manageable without sacrificing performance," said Joe Granneman, chief technology and security officer for Rockford Memorial Hospital. "I really wanted a solution where I could feel comfortable with our backup strategy for images, getting that intelligence of what we can send offsite versus what we can cache locally. In choosing Iron Mountain, we felt comfortable that our storage and archiving needs were addressed while helping to lower costs and get medical image management off our staff’s plates. With Iron Mountain’s cloud storage solution in place, we can now focus on managing our clinical applications supporting our core mission of patient care."

For medical images, the Digital Record Center for Medical Images seamlessly integrates into users’ existing picture archiving and communications system (PACS) environments, presenting itself as a remote storage archive to the healthcare provider’s onsite PACS. With more than 30 PACS vendors (or roughly 85 percent of the market) certifying the service, the Digital Record Center for Medical Images works as an extension of an organization’s PACS application so data migration is seamless and scalable. Providers can centralize and consolidate images for more control over patient images and to lower costs.

"Cloud storage offers clear advantages above traditional solutions: Significant cost reduction, improved disaster recovery, and simplified storage infrastructure for hospitals," said Ken Rubin, senior vice president of the digital healthcare solutions for Iron Mountain. "Hospitals and healthcare organizations find themselves tested by expanding data volumes and shrinking resources, with the added burden of being able to share their data across the enterprise. The Digital Record Center for Medical Images gives them unlimited storage capacity but consumable on a ‘pay-for-use’ basis – the best of all worlds. Hospitals can refocus their resources on patient care rather than tying up precious capital on archiving and backup. The net outcome is lower storage management costs with better data protection and without compromising information access or patient care."