NetApp and Iron Mountain Partnering in Healthcare

The healthcare industry is at a data-management crossroads, driven by the growth of patient data, tighter federal and industry regulations, shrinking IT budgets, and the transition to electronic health records. Healthcare organizations are challenged to control data growth and manage large content repositories, cut storage costs, improve disaster recovery, and eliminate the barriers between accessing and sharing clinical and patient data and medical images to continue delivering high quality of patient care.

NetApp, Inc. and Iron Mountain Incorporated announced a partnership to provide healthcare organizations with a secure cloud-based solution for medical data archiving and disaster recovery. Iron Mountain is the only healthcare-focused member of the NetApp Service Provider Partner Program, which was officially launched in June 2010 and was the first of its kind in the storage industry.

Building on their collaboration under this program, the two companies will integrate NetApp StorageGRID object storage software with two Iron Mountain medical data archiving solutions – the Digital Record Center for Medical Images and its vendor neutral archive offering – to provide healthcare organizations with consolidated archiving and disaster recovery offerings that help deliver improved medical care to their patients.

Cloud-based archiving and disaster recovery, with its levels of flexibility, scalability, access, and security of complex and diverse big-data assets, can help eliminate issues around system interoperability and disaster recovery by moving data offsite and keeping it independent of existing systems.

The joint solutions enable healthcare organizations to:

• Control storage growth and reduce costs. Cloud storage offers a secure and accessible pay-as-you-go model, with healthcare organizations using only what they need and avoiding the large capital expenses required for long-term storage solutions. Storage-related operating costs are typically 3 to 4 times the cost of maintaining the hardware involved; cloud storage addresses these operating costs with a lower-cost approach.
• Improve disaster recovery and compliance. Moving data offsite into the cloud means faster recoverability in the event of a disaster while minimizing the cost and risk of data loss. Also, it allows organizations to meet current HIPAA compliance standards that require a disaster recovery plan and policies for protecting that data.
• Reduce management complexity. IT departments no longer have to manage multiple storage systems and the interoperability challenges they present. As a result, medical data is liberated, making it easier to access and share information across the entire continuum of care. And, as a managed service, data is automatically and continuously moved offsite and archived, freeing IT staff and resources from managing data centers, or backup and archiving tasks to focus on clinical and revenue-generating activities.

Ken Rubin, senior vice president and general manager for Healthcare, Iron Mountain, said: "The explosion of clinical, patient, and imaging data and shrinking budgets have boxed many healthcare organizations into a corner, straining their storage capacity and IT resources to the limit. The answer is cloud-based storage and archiving. Iron Mountain’s medical image archiving offerings deliver the best of all worlds: unlimited capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis with improved off-site disaster recovery that is more cost effective and less complicated than doing it yourself. And, through our partnership with NetApp, we can deliver a variety of service options, including our hybrid cloud service, all with extremely high security and reliability that is transparent to clinicians."

Dave Nesviksy, senior director of Healthcare Sales and Business Development, NetApp, said: "Empowering our customers to effectively manage their unstructured data and make it accessible in the care process and across the continuum of care with cloud services is strategic to NetApp’s go-to-market healthcare charter. We chose to partner with an industry leader like Iron Mountain because they enable us to deliver an innovative solution to our healthcare customers that solves their archiving and disaster recovery needs. This in turn allows our customers to focus on delivering the highest quality of service and care to positively affect patients’ outcomes. Applying technology in such a way that it provides a meaningful impact to so many is what we’re striving to accomplish with our healthcare practice."