December 30, 2011 — NetApp and Iron Mountain Inc. recently announced a partnership to provide healthcare organizations with a secure cloud-based solution for medical data archiving and disaster recovery. Iron Mountain is currently the only healthcare-focused member of the NetApp Service Provider Partner Program, which was officially launched in June 2010.
The two companies will also integrate NetApp StorageGRID object storage software with two Iron Mountain’s Digital Record Center for Medical Images, as well as its vendor neutral archive offering. The goal is to provide healthcare organizations with consolidated archiving and disaster recovery offerings that help deliver improved medical care to their patients.
Cloud-based archiving and disaster recovery can help eliminate issues around system interoperability and disaster recovery by moving data offsite and keeping it independent of existing systems. The key features include greater levels of flexibility, scalability, access, and security of complex and diverse big-data assets.
The joint NetApp and Iron Mountain solutions enable healthcare organizations to:
Control storage growth and reduce costs. Cloud storage offers a secure and accessible pay-as-you-go model. This allows healthcare organizations to use only what they need and avoid the large capital expenses required for long-term, on-premise storage solutions. Storage-related operating costs are typically three to four times the cost of maintaining the hardware involved; cloud storage addresses these operating costs with a lower-cost approach.
Improve disaster recovery and compliance. Moving data off-site into the cloud means faster recoverability in the event of a disaster while minimizing the cost and risk of data loss. Also, it allows
organizations to meet current HIPAA compliance standards that require a disaster recovery plan and policies for protecting that data.
Reduce management complexity. IT departments no longer have to manage multiple storage systems and the interoperability challenges they present. As a result, medical data is liberated, making it easier to access and share information across the entire continuum of care. And, as a managed service, data is automatically and continuously moved offsite and archived; this frees IT staff and resources from managing data centers, or back-up and archiving tasks to focus on clinical and revenue-generating activities.
NetApp and Iron Mountain will display their medical imaging archiving and data recovery tools at RSNA 2011.
For more information: www.netapp.com/cloud
February 15, 2024 
