Surviving the Healthcare Data Flood
Healthcare organizations are generating data at a skyrocketing rate. While the volume of healthcare data was estimated at 153 exabytes in 2013, IDC predicts that it will reach an astounding 2314 exabytes by 2020 – a growth rate of 48% annually.
Clearly, all this data presents a challenge for today’s healthcare IT groups from a resource perspective. At the same time, the privacy and security requirements for how healthcare companies must manage this data continues to change.
Storage as a Strategic Asset
When architecting a storage solution, we believe certain requirements are critical to success – scalability, security and transactional speed. Without scalability, companies can’t leverage data as they grow. It must also be done efficiently – too often storage is a bottleneck that slows down every workload that requires the resource.
Virtualization and Consolidation
Eliminating silos and creating a virtualized, enterprise-wide storage solution is the best way to reduce costs and ensure scalability. More importantly, it ensures that you have the power to apply security policies globally to quickly adjust to regulatory changes.
Deduplication
Reduce storage needs by eliminating redundant data from the start. Storage solutions with federated deduplication capabilities, such as HPE 3PAR, ensure that only one unique instance of the data is actually retained on storage media. This significantly reduces resource requirements for primary, archival and back-up systems.
Flash
Because data plays a central role in the application delivery process, response time is critical to optimizing the performance of those applications. Flash storage provides superior speed over disc-based options, handling hundreds of thousands of I/O operations per second with sub-millisecond latency. Now that the cost of flash is on par with disc-based systems (less that $2 per usable GB), more healthcare organizations are adding all flash or hybrid arrays into their storage mix to speed processing for critical workloads.
Tiered Storage
Not all healthcare data is created equal – EMR data and lab results for patients currently under clinical review are far more critical to the organization than scheduling and HR information. IT groups can leverage the fact that data has different values to create a tiered approach to storage. By deploying mission critical information (Tier 1) on the fastest resources and moving the less important data down to slower systems (Tier 2 or 3), companies can cost-engineer their storage investments.
Back-up and Recovery
Taking the time to implement a centralized back-up, recovery and archival (BURA) solution will significantly reduce administrative work, organizational disruption and time to recovery in the long run. Solutions such as HPE StoreOnce can provide a consolidated BURA solution for multiple data centers and locations without downtime.
Data is critical to every aspect of the patient care – without a smooth flow of information across the organization, healthcare providers can’t admit patients, schedule them for tests or optimize their treatment plans. Let American Digital show you how to control the growing flood of healthcare data and turn it into a strategic asset for the entire organization.