{"id":51012,"date":"2021-04-29T09:00:43","date_gmt":"2021-04-29T07:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.open-e.com\/?p=51012"},"modified":"2025-06-24T09:17:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T09:17:47","slug":"hospitals-under-pressure-data-storage-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open-e.com\/blog\/hospitals-under-pressure-data-storage-challenges\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospitals Under Pressure – Data Storage Challenges"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As we all know during these pandemic times, hospitals are the last line of defense when it comes to fighting for our lives. But they are currently under pressure not only due to COVID-19<\/a>, but also due to ransomware, natural disasters, hardware failures, or even unfortunate human mistakes. Open-E JovianDSS is widely used to support hospital and medical care institutions, because of its reliability, high availability, and advanced data protection mechanisms<\/strong> that are critical<\/strong> when it comes to ensuring operational continuity and, what is even more important, patients\u2019 safety. Thus, we would like to address certain issues and propose solutions that are responses to medical institutions’ data storage problems.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

High Availability is the Key<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since hospitals\u2019 IT needs are very specific, they need safe and stable solutions that will protect their data from all kinds of threats. Just to begin with, the high availability data storage<\/a><\/strong> solution should be one of the most important options for hospitals to protect against hardware failure. All major documents and data need to be accessed on both nodes in the cluster. This way even during hardware failure or data corruption, the data stays accessible thanks to the high availability cluster functionality.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"High<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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On- & Off-site Data Protection<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

But even the best-performing High Availability<\/strong> cluster doesn\u2019t protect you from flood, thefts, fire, and any other harmful events<\/strong> if all your data resides in one place. To keep your data infrastructure secure, you need to diversify your data protection approaches, and build the data storage that replicates your data and\/or backups not only on-site, but also off-site<\/a><\/strong>, to be restored in the event the primary location has been affected by any disaster. In the case of ransomware, the data will be simply restored from the locally or remotely accessed data snapshots, taken before the attack, and there will be no need to pay cybercriminals the ransom to get back access to the patients\u2019 data.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Off-site<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Multiple User Access<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since hospitals work 24 hours a day, and also have a lot of workstations that need constant and uninterrupted access to the system, the data storage system needs to be able to cover the massive and undisturbed workload, as well as various connection protocols. To be more specific, one of the Open-E users, a large Japanese hospital, has approximately 2000 workstations that need to use the system on a daily basis and utilize the LDAP, iSCSI, and SMB protocols<\/strong> to transfer data from one machine to another. Only a mature, comprehensive, and versatile data storage system can meet the requirements of infrastructure like this. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data Storage for Real-time Processing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Hospitals need access to critical information in no time. It can be a matter of life and death to instantly get the medical examination results of, for instance, MRI or base patient’s rates monitoring data during the surgeries or emergency procedures. Thus, the ability to speed up the data processing and the way the data is conveyed is one of the biggest advantages for hospital IT administrator.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

HIPAA Compliance-Readiness with Open-E JovianDSS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Open-E JovianDSS plays a crucial role in assisting healthcare facilities in achieving and maintaining HIPAA compliance. It provides robust data protection features, including secure access control, comprehensive monitoring, and disaster recovery capabilities. These functionalities enable organizations to effectively manage electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) securely, ensuring adherence to HIPAA’s stringent security and administrative safeguard requirements.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Final remarks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The hospital’s IT infrastructure is the demanding and critical part of its operations, so any issues or downtimes are simply not an option. It\u2019s important to understand what the weak points are and to implement solutions and policies that ensure both the patients and their data are safe. Like the one below:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As we all know during these pandemic times, hospitals are the last line of defense when it comes to fighting for our lives. But they are currently under pressure not …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55715,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[801,27,796],"tags":[177,178,325,460],"class_list":["post-51012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-healthcare","category-open-e-joviandss","category-zfs-data-storage","tag-cybersecurity","tag-cyberthreats","tag-hospitals","tag-open-e"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t