Business Continuity

As businesses transform into increasingly data reliant operations, the need for fast, consistent and reliable access to their core business systems becomes critical. Frequent or occasional system outages can hamper efforts to fulfill customer orders, deliver products and services, and ensure reliable customer service to clients.

When SystemArchitecture.NET started working with a large healthcare organization with over 18 locations spread across the State of Maine, their entire enterprise was dependent on an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system running on a single Storage Area Network (SAN) device. While SANs offer redundancy at the hard drive level, this single device represented a single point of failure, susceptible to systemic device failure, connectivity outages, fire/flood/theft and a host of other potential operation killers.

It was estimated at the time that such a failure could result in several DAYS of downtime, meaning the EMR would be completely unavailable for doctors, nurses and care providers to use to access patient records, conduct encounters, issue prescriptions, etc. effectively crippling the organization. The estimated financial impact was estimated at over $1,000,000 potentially resulting in bankruptcy.

After accessing the storage and processing requirements of the system as well as the need to have a redundant, geo-diverse server environment available in the event of a disaster, a Hyper Convergent architecture was deployed resulting in fail-over capabilities both locally (within the primary location) as well as remotely to the secondary fail-over site located over 100 miles away.

Real-time replication built into the solution ensured full system functionality could be restored with up-to-the-minute data within minutes, as opposed to hours or days. As a result, business continuity risk was greatly reduced if not eliminated, inefficient legacy backup strategies were retired, system administration complexity was eased, and overall system performance was improved.