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Data volumes at UKDD are growing rapidly. This data must be highly available and stored according to strict guidelines and security standards. When modernization of the deployed storage solution became necessary, UKDD wanted a flexible and efficient solution with a clear focus on ransomware protection and a high service level.
Success at a Glance
No effort for UKDD with the storage platform: administration, monitoring, updates & operations are handled by iTernity
WORM storage, ransomware protection, and failover resilience guarantee the security, integrity, and availability of data
Managing data growth with our scale-out solution iCAS FS
Benefiting from the advantages of the public cloud in your own data center
Andreas Naumertat
Team Leader Server/Storage/Backup, University Hospital Dresden
“Thanks to the architecture of iCAS FS, we have had even less effort with archive and storage since the migration. Since completing the data migration, we have almost completely handed over responsibility for it to iTernity.”
Bringing Sensitive Healthcare Data Securely into the Future
The Organization at a Glance
University Hospital Dresden is one of the largest hospitals in Saxony and the only hospital providing maximum care in Eastern Saxony. Over 53,000 patients are treated as inpatients and nearly 165,000 patients as outpatients each year. For UKDD’s IT department, data management is a sensitive process, as it involves a large volume of diverse critical health information from a multitude of sources with retention periods of up to 30 years. This data must be specially protected, must not be altered or manipulated, and must be retained according to strict requirements.
- Company: University Hospital Dresden
- Industry: Healthcare
- Employees: approx. 6,770
- Focus: inpatient and outpatient care, treatment of complex, particularly severe, or rare diseases
Security, Staff Shortages, and Data Growth
In 2015, UKDD’s IT managers decided to replace the proprietary network storage platform previously used for data storage, which had become outdated, with our archive middleware solution iCAS Classic. Since then, UKDD has successfully relied on iCAS Classic for secure and compliant archiving of sensitive data from the HYDMedia and DeepUnity systems of Dedalus Healthcare Group. HYDMedia is a comprehensive enterprise content management system for clinical and administrative areas in hospitals. All relevant information and documents are digitally integrated and made available at the workplace. DeepUnity is a PACS system. It offers a universal visualization solution for medical data (DICOM and non-DICOM) and enables secure access to all medical data from anywhere at any time. In 2020, another modernization of UKDD’s storage infrastructure was due.
In 2020, another modernization of UKDD’s storage infrastructure was due. In addition to
data from HYDMedia and DeepUnity, data from the email management system used by UKDD
was also to be archived and stored with the new solution in the future. Like many IT managers in healthcare, Gordon Schultz, Head of the Basic Infrastructure Department of the Directorate of Information Technology and Data Management at the Center for Medical Informatics at UKDD, sees the stability of today’s hospital IT threatened primarily by growing data volumes and thus ransomware attacks and skilled labor shortages.
Data growth is closely linked to costs, personnel planning, and IT security, because more data requires more storage space and new systems. These must be managed, updated, and secured. This in turn requires IT specialists, time, and money. More systems and resources often mean more complexity and additional entry points for cyberattacks.
Due to consistently positive experiences with our iCAS Classic archive middleware, our support
, and the recommendation of UKDD’s long-standing partner, Dedalus Healthcare Group, the decision was quickly made in favor of our managed storage platform iCAS FS. With iCAS FS, UKDD’s IT managers also chose a storage solution that combines the advantages of the public cloud with the security of on-premises solutions—a Cloud Experience On-Premises.
Storage Solution Requirements
Gordon Schultz
Head of the Basic Infrastructure Department of the Directorate of Information Technology and Data Management at the Center for Medical Informatics, University Hospital Dresden
“Future data growth is very difficult for us to estimate, especially with regard to research data, genomic data, AI, and projects such as the digitization of pathology. In addition, storage expansions always represent significant investments. However, we are convinced that with the cost-efficient and scalable platform iCAS FS, we have chosen a future-proof solution.”
Benefits and Next Steps
- Ransomware protection: iCAS FS is based on a hardened Linux system and does not provide administrator access on UKDD's side. This minimizes the attack surface for external and internal threats.
- Future-proofing: As a scale-out cluster, iCAS FS counters the difficult-to-calculate data growth. The software-defined solution can be easily expanded by adding cluster nodes.
- Compliance with legal requirements: With iCAS FS, UKDD meets all requirements for storing sensitive healthcare data.
- High availability: iCAS FS ensures high availability through transparent read/write failover and an active-active cluster. All nodes simultaneously perform the same services and step in for each other in the event of a failure.
In addition to projects such as the implementation of the KHZG and the upcoming integration of AI into medicine, Mr. Schultz and Mr. Naumertat are particularly concerned with the increasing threat of ransomware. Data growth, which will be fueled in the foreseeable future by, for example, the digitization of pathology, and thus planning and future security, are also major topics.
However, UKDD’s IT managers see themselves well equipped for this challenge with iCAS FS. An expansion of the storage platform was recently required, which is possible at any time without problems due to scalability.
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