How to protect healthcare data for the future

Healthcare

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Protect healthcare data efficiently and for the long term

In healthcare, patient care is paramount. Sensitive data requires secure storage methods which ensure long-term protection of data integrity and availability. While data volumes, IT complexity, and the number of cyber-attacks are increasing, many clinics and hospitals are faced with a shortage of IT professionals and tight IT budgets. With the right storage solution, healthcare organizations can address these conflicting priorities and protect their data in the long term.

Challenges

Diverse challenges, great responsibility

Secure data is critical for patient care. It must be protected, valid, and available over the long term.

Increasingly modern imaging processes from PACS and the like provide exponentially increasing data volumes.

Clinics and hospitals are targeted by cyber-attacks. Effective protective measures are mandatory to safeguard patient care.

In view of tight IT budgets, the costs and efforts for data storage must be reduced and the efficiency of the IT infrastructure increased.

Future-proof storage and archiving of healthcare data

The iCAS FS scale-out storage platform protects healthcare data from a wide variety of sources - such as PACS, EHR, ERP, DMS/ECM - from corruption, loss, deletion, and modification. This ensures the long-term integrity and availability of data, which is critical to patient care. Clinics and hospitals can use the software-based solution to meet complex compliance requirements and manage their data growth while reducing their overall costs and IT efforts.

Counter cyber attacks

Counter cyber attacks

Clinics and hospitals are a lucrative target for cyber criminals and attacks on backups are steadily increasing. Successful manipulation of data by unauthorized persons can have far-reaching consequences, as it can have a direct impact on patient well-being.

How you can solve this challenge with iCAS FS:

Data immutability thanks to S3 Object Lock and WORM storage (Write Once Read Many)
iCAS FS is a closed, software-based system with hardened Linux operating system
Minimized IT attack surface: there is no administrative access to the system on the customer side
Intelligent replication and self-healing
Encryption at rest, encryption in transit, and encryption of internal cluster communication
The iCAS FS system is completely administered and monitored by iTernity

Reduce IT efforts

Reduce IT efforts

Increasing storage requirements and complexity clash with IT departments' time and staffing constraints. Clinics and hospitals can meet this challenge with automation and outsourcing.

How you can solve this challenge with iCAS FS:

All-time secure without time and staff overhead: monitoring of the entire storage setup & detection and correction of errors without touch points for the IT department
Relief of internal resources thanks to managed services: rapid installation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of the system including updates, critical security patches, and feature releases by iTernity
Time saved for core topics by outsourcing the "basic routine" (troubleshooting, monitoring, etc.)
No need to train and build up expertise of IT staff

Manage data growth

Manage data growth

Ever-improving medical imaging techniques, new telemedicine opportunities, the use of video, and the introduction of digital patient records are creating exponentially increasing amounts of data.

How you can solve this challenge with the iCAS FS scale-out storage platform:

Start small and scale out without limits thanks to a software-defined scale-out cluster
Minimize downtime or disruptions through simple and uninterrupted capacity expansion during operation
Start with a minimal configuration based on x86 hardware and grow as needed with your requirements

Meet compliance requirements

Meet compliance requirements

Requirements such as the GDPR, the IT Security Act, the X-ray Ordinance, HIPAA, or the eHealth Act regulate the handling, processing, and protection of data as well as their retention requirements. In general, the aim is to protect sensitive and personal data from damage, modification, manipulation, loss, or deletion and to increase the security of IT systems.

How you can solve these challenges with iCAS FS:

Protection against manipulation, modification, or deletion of data during the retention period by WORM storage (Write Once Read Many) and S3 Object Lock
Ensuring the correct storage of health data within the legal retention periods through comprehensive retention management (time limits, time stamps, blocking concept, etc.)
Ensuring data consistency and integrity through self-healing
Protection against unauthorized data access through A256 encryption
Complete and traceable documentation of all changes and accesses in the audit trail
Certified by KPMG for compliance with GDPR and further regulations

Reduce complexity

Reduce complexity

IT departments have to implement the requirements of a wide variety of departments. This leads to the administration of diverse applications and historically grown silo architectures, which can cause the IT infrastructure to reach a high level of complexity.

How you can solve this challenge with iCAS FS:

Reduction of administration efforts, costs and complexity by consolidating backup, archive and research data in a central storage platform
Seamless integration into the existing IT landscape thanks to 140 validated applications (PACS, HIS, ECM, DMS, ERP...) and backup software solutions
Maximum flexibility thanks to hardware independence: use of a wide range of manufacturers, technologies and hardware possible
Seamless interaction with existing or future healthcare applications thanks to open interfaces

Learn more about iCAS FS

Whitepaper: How to protect healthcare data

The increasing demands on data storage in healthcare present many IT managers with enormous challenges and uncertainties. How can the growing volumes of data from PACS etc. be managed in a future-proof manner? How can overall costs and time be reduced? How can data integrity and availability be secured in the long term?

Read the white paper to learn how you can create secure, flexible, and cost-effective healthcare data storage and archiving which can withstand increasing IT demands over the long term.

Download Whitepaper

What our customers say

Among other things, the overall solution with iCAS impressed us with its hardware independence, and it could be integrated into our existing infrastructure such as the storage network and the virtualization solution. By combining ECM and archive backend, we have laid the foundation for a hospital-wide data management and audit-proof archive and can expand this foundation flexibly and easily.

Robert Hasenstab

Head of IT at the Goethe University Hospital Frankfurt

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Strong partners for comprehensive solutions in hospitals

Complex and demanding requirement in the healthcare sector combined with increasingly shrinking budgets urge hospitals to look for proven and integrated solutions. We have realized many successful implementations with our partners of which you find some below.

Cost Comparison Public Cloud vs. On-Premises

Analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) has compared the total cost of long-term data storage between the scale-out archive platform iCAS FS and leading public cloud storage solutions. The result is surprisingly clear and demolishes some widely held assumptions.

Read in the TCO study how you can reduce the total cost of ownership by over 53% with iCAS FS and optimize the efficiency and security of your IT infrastructure with further measures.

Download ESG TCO Study