Introduction

The medical sector has come under increasing pressure to be vigilant with regard to the protection of confidential patient information and ensure the secure retention of historical medical records. This regional healthcare organization operates 35 clinics and medical centers across the United States. Utilizing over 60 servers and numerous desktops and laptops across the company to access, share and store critical business information and medical data, the organization is experiencing a period of significant growth in the technology part of the business as they migrated to a new patient management system and new email platform.

The Challenge

The management of the organization’s data had become a complicated and intricate issue with the introduction of new technologies, the addition of new branch locations and the requirement to meet HIPAA compliance. The existing backup infrastructure consisted of traditional LTO tape drive backup hardware coupled with CA Arcserve backup software. Each remote location was supported by a varying degree of IT expertise and in many cases are supported by IT contractors with differing degrees of on site presence and familiarity with the backup requirements of the business. This resulted in a high percentage of failed backups and regular tape replacement. This issue was highlighted when a necessary restore (of non patient data) was required and not able to be processed due to the inconsistent nature of the tape backup infrastructure.

The cost of maintaining a best practice and compliant backup schedule was also on the increase. The number of tapes that needed to be replaced each month, quarter and year was steadily on the increase as was the failure rate of aging tape drive hardware and the maintenance pricing of ARCServe backup software. In addition with an increasing number of servers, desktops and laptops requiring to be backed up, the licensing costs for additional backup agents was expected to rise.

The Approach

The company reviewed new backup solutions as part of a new initiative to meet HIPPA requirements and improve and refine the disaster recovery procedures of the business. The new design required replacement of the tape backup approach with an online backup solution that would send the backup to a secure, off site location but allow for encrypted backups to be performed locally to disk as well if required. The solution needed to accommodate the various bandwidth constraints of remote locations, be easily implemented and managed and support Windows, Microsoft Access, Open files, Microsoft Exchange and Oracle. After talking with LokkBox, researching on the Internet, meeting with competing companies and comparing services with the biggest and most renowned online backup providers, the company chose LokkBox Online Backup for field trials. Working directly with LokkBox, a selection of servers and desktops was setup for off site and local backups at a number of sites throughout the company. The size of the test backup data was 100GB.

The LokkBox Online Backup Manager (OBM) was installed on Windows 2000, 2003, XP, and Vista hosts for the preliminary trial. These machines represented a mixture of basic file backup, Microsoft Access backup, Microsoft Exchange backup and Oracle backup. Initial backups were performed quickly and without error and after this initial period the backup windows of most sites were reduced to less than 30 minutes. Customized retention policies were implemented to mirror traditional tape rotation policies of keeping 7 daily tapes, 4 weekly tapes, 12 monthly tapes, 8 quarterly tapes and 10 yearly tapes. Setup for each machine / host took less than 10 minutes.

The Results

The project has successfully met and continues to meet all of its goals. Tape support requirements were eliminated for all locations as well as off site storage services form 3rd parties. Every site has the ability and responsibility of managing the process and the data but the Corporate IT staff manages reporting and central configuration control. No local IT intervention is required to perform, maintain or verify backups.

Moving to an online based backup process with advanced features has allowed the company to meet its backup windows, meet HIPAA compliance, improve its recovery speed and disaster recovery process, and allows for management of the process with the same staff in less time, even as the number of servers and the amount of data has grown.

Most importantly, the cost for the online backup solution is now less than the company was paying for the tape based backup solution. Additional clients are being added to the backup schemes on a regular basis with no additional charge for client software due to the LokkBox policy of unlimited clients per account.

Critical Success Factors

The company identified the following as key to the project’s success:

*LokkBox managed to provide a quick and ‘easy to implement’ solution to allow immediate and regular backups of data at all locations

*HIPAA compliance was met

*The LokkBox pricing was extremely affordable and simple which allowed the company to realize an immediate monthly ROI compared to the old tape based backup system

*The compatibility with Operating systems, databases and applications meant that the company could be confident of LokkBox being able to backup all information critical to the business and at no extra cost than the monthly subscription

*LokkBox’s ‘in-file delta’ backup technology provided the necessary solution to meet tight backup window times by dramatically reducing the amount of data that needed to be processed each evening

*Centralized monitoring, configuration and reporting was immediately delivered by LokkBox’s unique web based account management portal and allows Corporate IT staff to manage their entire backup infrastructure from a single point

*The flexibility to perform a simultaneous backup to local storage of the company’s choosing provided an additional layer of protection. This local backup allowed for large amounts of data to be stored locally for immediate, LAN based restore. Alternatively, the web restore feature of LokkBox allowed for the company to securely and quickly restore any file from any location to any other location

*No other online backup provider was able to offer the combination of low cost, feature rich, easy to use and proven service