The Healthcare IT landscape has changed considerably over the last decade. Today, a myriad of challenges exist such as new regulations, high performance applications, massive healthcare data growth, and the need for non-stop data availability. Architecting a storage solution that meets these requirements while remaining financially viable is a daunting task.
If I was to list out the top three highest priority challenges for Healthcare IT managers to address, they would be: Data Availability, Storage Scalability, and Storage Performance.
Challenge: Data Availability – Achieving Maximum Application Uptime
Data availability is focused on maintaining uninterrupted data accessibility, even in the event of a catastrophic failure, within the storage infrastructure due to user error, hardware malfunction, site failures and/or regional disasters. Uninterrupted data accessibility is an absolute must in the healthcare industry. Failure to sustain uptime could result in a negative impact on patient health, including loss of life, and/or severe financial penalties.
Challenge: Storage Scalability – Expanding Storage Capacity Without Disruption
Storage scalability has a dual focus. The first is how efficiently data is being stored on the existing storage hardware. The second is the presentation of additional capacity, ideally without interruption, to the production systems. With the increasing capacity demands from strict data retention policies and data-intensive healthcare applications such as EHR and PACS, maintaining a scalable storage platform is critical to operations.
Challenge: Storage Performance – Minimizing Application Latency
Storage performance is the main variable affecting application performance, which directly impacts patient care. Simply introducing high speed storage within the infrastructure for a particular application is no longer tenable when addressing performance. There are too many applications, too many databases, and too many systems involved to improve performance this way.
Conclusion
Healthcare IT is expected to maximize the return on every investment. But, there is also a great need for high-performance, reliable, enterprise-grade storage systems, which are expensive.
Consider the impact on ROI and TCO with a purpose built solution that allows you to leverage any make and model of storage system, all while providing blazing performance and the most advanced forms of data protection to safeguard your data. And as conditions change over time, expand without interruption, the resources needed to fulfill the demands of the new requirement.
For more information on the solution to these challenges, download our white paper: The Solution for Healthcare IT Data Storage Challenges.
