How to protect healthcare data for the future

Data Storage & Archiving for Healthcare

Protect health 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.

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.

Whitepaper: How to protect healthcare data in the long term, flexibly, and cost-effectively

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

iTernity solutions

Future-proof archiving and storage of health data with iCAS FS

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 can ensure 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.

Highly available & secure

Unlimited scalability

Cost-effective

Time-saving

Managing 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:

High flexibility due to unlimited scalability from 20 TB, easy adaptability to actual demand at low cost
Minimization of downtime or disruptions through simple and uninterrupted capacity expansion during operation
Start with a minimal configuration (e.g., one cluster node) and grow as needed with increasing requirements

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:

Minimize time and manpower with zero-touch operation: automatically monitor the entire storage setup; independently detect and fix errors with no 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

Adhere to 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)
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, GoBD (Basic principles on the proper keeping and storage of financial books, recordings, and documents in electronic form as well as data access, GeBüV (Regulation for business records management)

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, labor costs, and complexity by consolidating backup, archive, and research data on a single, central interface (software-based archive storage system)
Creation of a universal archive for more than 120 validated applications (PACS, HIS, ECM, DMS, ERP, etc.)
Maximum flexibility thanks to hardware independence: use of a wide range of manufacturers, technologies, and hardware possible
Easy integration and seamless interaction with existing or future healthcare applications through open interfaces

Counter cyber attacks

Clinics and hospitals have been a popular target for cyber criminals for years, and attacks are steadily increasing. Successful manipulation and modification of data by unauthorized persons can have far-reaching consequences, because they can have a direct impact on patient well-being.

How you can solve this challenge with iCAS FS:

Stored WORM files in iCAS FS cannot be modified, encrypted, or deleted
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
Data loss due to hardware defects or catastrophes is prevented by the use of RAID and cluster-wide replication in connection with the self-healing procedure
Encryption at rest, encryption in transit, and encryption of internal cluster communication
The iCAS FS system is completely administered and monitored by iTernity

Reduce the total cost of data storage

Analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group 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 Cost Analysis

Hospital Futures Act: iTernity solutions are eligible for funding

With the Hospital Future Act, the federal and state governments have set up a fund worth over 4 billion euros to drive forward digitalization and IT security in German clinics and hospitals. iTernity's solutions are also eligible for funding. These ensure the availability and integrity of business-critical data as well as the confidentiality of information technology systems, components, or processes which are crucial to the security of patient information.

We will be happy to support you in applying for a grant for our archiving solutions.

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."

Further healthcare and life science references

Partners

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 a few below.

Downloads & Ressources

Healthcare Flyer

iCAS FS Scale-Out Platform Flyer

iCAS Middleware Flyer

TCO comparison of public cloud and on-premises archiving TCO Study

How to protect healthcare data in the long term, flexibly, and cost-effectively Whitepaper

Contact our experts

Want to learn more about our solutions for storing and protecting health data for the long term? Tell us about your challenges, request more information or arrange a demo with our experts!

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