September 23, 2014 — Hospitals and healthcare systems in need of a cost-effective, HIPAA-compliant solution for long-term archiving of healthcare data now have an alternative to on-site redundant archiving. ClearDATA Networks Inc. announced its new cloud-based Archive as a Service solution. It is the first offering of its kind created specifically to meet requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for archiving of healthcare data that does not need to be accessed immediately or regularly.
Healthcare organizations and medical research facilities create petabytes of confidential patient information, including patient records, lab results and images, each year. HIPAA can sometimes require a large amount of this information to be stored for up to seven years, even though it is rarely (if ever) accessed. These requirements can severely impact IT budgets as organizations pay an ever-growing price for equipment, power, cooling, floor space, backup and recovery capabilities and personnel to maintain it all. In addition, many medical research facilities still use tape to archive older data despite concerns about its reliability.
ClearDATA’s Archive as a Service solution overcomes these issues by allowing healthcare organizations to archive data that can tolerate longer recovery timeframes on secure, HIPAA-compliant servers through the cloud. The solution is heavily encrypted while data is in transit and at rest, while remaining rapidly scalable to meet greater data storage needs.
Users who have the required permissions and administrative privileges will be able to create, modify and read data on the cluster through many supported file sharing protocols. Smart Lock technology protects critical data from accidental, premature or malicious alteration or deletion, ensuring the organization continues to meet HIPAA requirements.
Other capabilities include:
- Detailed file-level reporting
- Advanced data retention rules
- Smart Quota soft/hard quotas
Once the per-GB cost is set it is frozen, delivering an additional advantage to budget-conscious organizations.
“As healthcare continues to shift to the cloud, ClearDATA remains steadily focused on meeting both short-term and long-term storage needs,” said Matt Ferrari, chief technical officer at ClearDATA. “With our encrypted cloud archival solution, we are addressing a healthcare organizations’ long-term data storage needs, enabling providers to securely store and retrieve sensitive data on-demand.”
ClearDATA provides all management of the equipment and data, freeing the healthcare organization’s IT resources to focus on higher-value work. All data is encrypted prior to electronic or physical transfer (the latter is used for any single transfer larger than 200 GB).
For more information: www.cleardata.com/cm/content/archive-as-a-service.asp
February 15, 2024 
