In December 2020, a big cosmetic surgery chain in the united kingdom fell victim to a ransomware attack as near 1 TB of patient photo data was stolen. While patients were naturally worried about their private records exposure in the general public domain, a healthcare facility chain had to take into account the economic impact and irreparable reputational loss from this attack. In the event that you thought that the web and financial sectors were probably the most vunerable to data security breaches, think again. Based on the Tenable Research 2020 Threat Landscape Retrospective Report, year of the 22 billion records of private information exposed last, the biggest share belonged to the healthcare industry.

The digitalization of the medical industry started compared to the financial industry later, but progress has accelerated during the last few years greatly. Today, emerging ICT technologies such as for example cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence are employed across hospitals and clinics widely. Application scenarios such as for example remote treatment and diagnosis, mobile ward rounds, and medical record sharing are receiving more popular since they deliver great convenience to both patients and doctors.

At the same time, increased digitalization has managed to get more challenging to guard hospital information systems (HIS). From external malware threats apart, business interruptions due to network and storage failures have occurred lately often, rendering paralyzing hospitals’ operations. Think about the following incidents:

year resulted in a surge in patients and their records

• The pandemic last, posing an excellent challenge to the servers of a domestic hospital in China. Once the hospital’s data system suddenly turn off, technicians could actually restore the operational system following a few hours, however, many critical data was lost completely.

• • An full hour before midnight, a respected hospital reported one in the doctor’s station system that interrupted diagnosis and treatment. On inspection by engineers on-site, it had been discovered that disk storage was full because of the sudden upsurge in database system logs. Nights emergency repairs conducted in cooperation with hardware and software manufacturers even with a whole, the machine returned to a temporary state of operations barely.

Just how forward  

Full-lifecycle data protection may be the foundation for consolidating digital transformation and ensuring business continuity. Full-lifecycle data protection requires complete structural design for data protection, including production system disaster data and recovery backup strategies. Different data protection mechanisms have to be adopted based on the criticality and forms of healthcare data.

Take the HIS for example. Because the core IT system of a healthcare facility, HIS contains entire processes, from the registration of patients to treatment and diagnosis. It is also the primary carrier of the hospital’s hot data, that is needed to react to business demands immediately, a day 24 hours. This data takes a comprehensive data protection solution with one of these key facets:

• • A tragedy recovery mechanism to generate an passive or active full copy of the foundation data.

• • A backup mechanism to generate several time-based copies of the foundation data.

• • Reliable maintenance and operations of the info.

1. 1. Equipment with the industry’s highest seven-nines reliability

OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage delivers the industry’s highest seven-nines reliability. The storage tolerates failures of seven out of eight controllers and the failure of an individual controller enclosure without service interruption. Moreover, SSDs yield a 5-year return rate of 0 just.8%, that is 10 times less than HDDs.

With regards to performance, the OceanStor all-flash storage delivers the record of 21 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) under typical commonly used I/O patterns. For instance, when data reduction, garbage snapshot and collection are enabled, the performance of OceanStor storage decreases by no more than 10% and remains stable. On the other hand, the average performance of other vendors’ storage decreases by 40%.

With regards to availability, OceanStor all-flash storage offers a 100% data availability guarantee, as the FlashEver hardware subscription model protects the customer’s investment.

2. 2. Data disaster recovery and backup solutions

Whether data is stored on-premise or in the cloud, disaster recovery preparedness is vital for medical units in order to guarantee high data availability and seamless business continuity.

Huawei offers a comprehensive all-flash disaster recovery portfolio including a gateway-free active-active solution, a remote replication solution, and 3DC solutions. These solutions derive from OceanStor BCManager for unified, intelligent, and simplified disaster recovery O&amp and scheduling;M management.

In the backup scenario, Huawei has an all-flash backup backup and appliance storage, delivering high bandwidth, high capacity and a higher data reduction ratio. As the main reason for backup would be to recover data when needed, Huawei’s OceanProtect backup solutions feature industry-leading backup and recovery speeds.

3. 3. Going proactive instead of reactive to boost operation and maintenance capabilities  

Traditional maintenance and operations is dependant on a trigger approach. Only once problems occur, counter measures are initiated out the fire”and troubleshoot the reason to“put. However, the perfect O&M schedule ought to be proactive: detecting hidden faults beforehand through situational awareness to be able to fix them with time.

Huawei’s Data Management Engine, or DME, helps to ensure automated management through the info lifecycle. It automatically collects the running status of most devices make it possible for end-to-end storage network awareness. In addition, it predicts and warns about faults to greatly help prevent disasters and will intelligently analyze information to rapidly locate the main factors behind these faults. Lastly, it offers expert suggestions to greatly help optimize systems, achieving end-to-end thereby, trusted automated execution of maintenance tasks.

      Everything starts and ends with data          

Data can be an critical core asset of healthcare organizations. If hospitals desire to make use of the value of data fully, they need to ensure data availability and security first. A whole and reliable data protection solution can be an urgent need thus. For the present time, many customers in the medical industry have deployed replication and active-active solutions in HIS systems, and all-flash based backup system solutions have grown to be a significant option for hospital data backup gradually. Going forward, hospitals can achieve full-lifecycle data protection through improved coordination between your three essentials: disaster recovery, backup, and maintenance and operations.

      Huawei has an all-flash based full-lifecycle data protection portfolio that is deployed by many customers to accelerate digital transformation and ensure the safe and sustainable operation of medical services. For a synopsis of Huawei's all-flash storage products and solutions,           click                     here                              .