August 19, 2008

Online Data Backup – Simpler than you ever thought
By Steven Rodin
President, Storagepipe

In case of a crisis, your medical practice’s data backup and recovery plan needs to be taken very seriously. Unfortunately, most medical facilities are woefully unprotected in this – one of the most critical IT areas.

In recent years, increases in U.S. regulatory mandates like HIPAA and the high cost of human resources continue to constrain physicians’ practices. If you combine those constraints with limited resources and daily growth of databases, a secure and reliable backup process becomes critical. Despite these growing concerns, many practices are still backing up their data manually on tape or disk in an unsecured manner.

According to a recent statement by the Realtime IT Compliance Community, there have been over 32,000 reports of complaint about HIPAA to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) within the past 5 years.

Now more than ever, it’s clear that physicians need to pay attention. Here are some things you need to know about data backup:

The biggest threat to my data is not a natural catastrophe, theft or fire.
Fires in California, hurricanes in the Gulf, and blizzards anywhere get the big news coverage, but the truth is that technology failure like crashed hard drives or operator error are the biggest threats to business data.

According to study by Carnegie Mellon University, your hard drive faces up to a 13% chance of failing within the next year. If you have multiple hard drives, the dangers can quickly multiply.

Solution – Backing up your data automatically, securely and off-site will protect your company from these major threats.

Regular backup processes does not protect from data loss.
Regular backup processes only have value when they are monitored and tested. The process may be performed but some files are skipped. Also, the backup media such as tape or CDs could become corrupted with time or the backup media could be lost.

Since time is money, speed of recovery is also important. You can’t afford to have paid staff and patients waiting hours or days for the data to recover. You need to provide your staff with instant access to critical files so they can get back to serving patients fast.

Solution – Check your backup regularly by retrieving files back to their original locations. This will confirm the correct files are being backed up and the data is indeed retrievable. Also, store the backup media offsite and make sure the data is appropriately encrypted.

Better yet, align your practice with a firm focused exclusively oin online data backup, storage and recovery.

With respect to your computer tech, he/ she likely does not have backup under control
Conversations with physicians and IT professionals reveal the best way for physicians to gain insight into their own backup is for them to check it themselves periodically.

One of our clients related how they had set up an automated backup process for their medical office. When she was called in to retrieve that data after a data disaster, she found that the file locations had been changed over time, rendering the backup useless.

Solution – Select a firm, knowledgeable with the medical business and their complex data backup and recovery requirements. Personally test the quality of the backup. Ask yourself: How quickly can I access the data? Is it in a usable format? Can you retrieve it in case the IT professional is not available?

Steven Rodin is President of Storagepipe and can be reached at steven.rodin@storagepipe.com

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