Data redundancy is a big consideration for disaster recovery planning. Tighter budgets may lead smaller hospitals to rely on a single data center, but strategies have to be worked out for backing up data in a practical fashion.
A Healthcare Informatics article gives an overview of the steps Beaufort Memorial Hospital in Beaufort, S.C., took to increase the reliability of their data services. The 197-bed community hospital is near the Atlantic coast so in addition to its in-house data center it had a leased "warm" site further inland, where copied data was stored.
Piggybacking off a new building being built on the main campus, the hospital decided to install a second data center in the new facility. The two data centers on campus are linked via a fiber optic cable with a 10 gigabyte per second capacity, the article says. The warm site is connected by a leased line.
In the future, the hospital plans to turn the warm site hot, able to run the hospital's systems. Data is now backed up at both the secondary data center and the warm site.
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