Top Disaster Recovery Strategies For Healthcare Organizations

By Jeff Whitehead

An insufficient disaster recovery plan is much like a lack of blood flow to the brain. If a disaster strikes, the damage to your organization can be difficult, if not impossible to overcome. Consider the cost you might incur if lightning struck and took down your primary business server. Would your patients’ medical records and other healthcare-related data be recoverable? How long would it take for your organization to be back up and running?

According to IDC, the average cost of downtime is about $100,000 per hour. Even more surprising, most organizations experience 10 to 20 hours of unplanned downtime every year — and that’s without any disaster taking place. Factor in major events including fires, hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes, and the probability that your organization could be offline for days or even weeks becomes high.

That’s why it’s critical for your organization to be prepared. Fortunately, being disaster recovery (DR)-ready is easier and more cost effective than ever by leveraging advanced solutions for business continuity that use the cloud to support DR processes.  

Cloud-based DR, sometimes referred to as Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service or DRaaS, can offer robust performance and features without the high implementation cost. Thanks to advancements in data transfer technologies, bigger data can now be securely replicated to a cloud-based datacenter with exceptional speed. If your primary server fails, you can instantly “spin up” a version of the server in the cloud and run operations just as you normally would by using the cloud-based version of your data so you can run your critical applications without interruption. Once your failed server is back online, you can easily restore your most current applications and their data from the cloud — all without suffering any data loss or wasting work time.

4 Essential DRaaS Features To Assure Business Continuity

If you’re considering a cloud-based DR solution, consider the following essential features. This will ensure that your new DR strategy is not only effective, but efficient as well. Select a cloud-based DR solution that will:  

1. Spin up physical and virtual servers and applications in the cloud. Not all cloud DR solutions are built the same. When selecting the DR solution for your organization, opt for a product that will run both physical and virtual servers and applications from the cloud without interruption to workflow. This will help you continue on with business as usual following a larger site disaster. It also assures that you can protect all of your workflows with ease, regardless of whether they are hosted on a physical server or virtual machine.
    
2. Offer direct-to-cloud CR – without an appliance. Many DR solutions require the installation of a physical appliance, which sits between your server and the cloud connection. This adds complexity and can cause bottlenecks in the recovery process because you’ll need to replace the appliance before your server can be restored. This can cost you valuable time in managing extra, unnecessary hardware. Recovery in the event of a disaster should be fast, and direct-to-cloud recovery ensures that speed and simplicity.  
    
3. Be affordable. The idea that DR is a luxury that only larger enterprises can afford is a myth.  With the simplicity of a direct-to-cloud DR solution, companies of every size can easily achieve business continuity and protect all their applications and workloads efficiently and cost effectively. Select a cloud DR solution that offers a clear and affordable pricing model, so you can protect all of your vital healthcare applications and unstructured files without breaking the bank.  
    
4. Recover your most current information. Recovering from a disaster isn’t valuable if you aren’t able to recover the most current set of your important data. Be sure that the DR solution you rely on gives you access to the most recently backed up data, so that your recovery is not only quick and affordable, but useful as well.

Cloud-based DR will give your organization the solid foundation of reliability to withstand anything that comes your way. Be disaster-ready with a true business continuity solution that will support your high availability requirements.

Jeff Whitehead is vice president of engineering and operations for Zetta and an expert in cloud-based data protection, online backup and disaster recovery for the healthcare industry.