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Peak 10 Expands DRaas Service Lengthening Recovery History

Peak 10 updates its DRaaS solutions, adding a longer recovery history and expanded testing capabilities.

Peak 10 upgrades its DRaaS solution.

Source: Thinkstock

By Elizabeth O'Dowd

- Peak 10 announced upgrades to its disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) Recovery Cloud with a new failback expansion feature called Extended Journaling.

The new feature allows organizations to expand testing capabilities and recover data to points up to 14 days earlier. This extended data recovery time lowers operational risk and the potential for data loss in the event of an IT infrastructure breach or natural disaster.

Peak 10 developed its Extended Journaling feature in response to the for more options at time of disaster. Healthcare organizations are much more dependent on applications and require more advanced disaster recovery tools to bring applications back online quickly.

“Disaster Recovery continues to be a major priority for our customers as the security of their data and success of their business become increasingly intertwined,” Peak 10 Vice President of Product Steve Renda said in a statement. “There are a growing number of threats that can compromise enterprises’ IT and business operations.”

The update includes broader support of disaster testing strategies including multi-day exercises. The Extended Journaling feature also reduces the risk of data loss through self-service control of data replication journaling.

Extended Journaling automates the recovery of applications at designated points in time and offers increased disaster preparedness.

Disaster recovery is a significant part of health IT infrastructure because of the dependency organizations have on their digital ecosystems.

Equipment failure, power loss, natural disasters, or human error can make it necessary for organizations to recover their data quickly. Organizations left without an efficient backup and disaster solution as part of their health IT infrastructure, may be down for days without access to vital clinical data.

Zetta CEO Mike Grossman told HITInfrastructure.com that healthcare organizations have more at stake than other industries when data and applications become unavailable.

“Where backup and recovery is particularly stark is when being down directly impacts the business,” Grossman said. “It’s a significant issue in the context of healthcare where people’s lives are involved. The real issue is, what happens when something goes wrong, what do you do to recover the data, and how quickly can you be up and running again?”

Simply backing up data isn’t enough. Organizations can have a backup solution that collects data on-premise or in the cloud. A backup solution does not always include a recovery component so organizations can be left with a backup data repository and no way to retrieve the data and get back online.

“Recoverability is one of the key challenges for organizations,” Grossman stressed. “Even if the data is stored in an off-premise cloud server, being able to restore the data rapidly ends up being a challenge. When organizations have backup solutions, they don’t really have a good way of recovering data, or in the disaster recovery context, recover their applications.”

Cloud-based DRaaS solutions offer organizations a flexible and reliable way to recover data. Grossman explained that healthcare organizations are shifting to cloud-based IT infrastructure solutions as the general mistrust for the healthcare cloud has dissipated. Entities continue to see the benefits of the cloud and disaster recovery is one area where cloud-based tools significantly benefit them.

“The biggest piece of advice for healthcare organizations implementing advanced backup and recovery solutions would be to consider a cloud solution,” Grossman advised. “Legacy solutions tend to have hidden costs and are hard to manage which makes it difficult to get up and running when something goes wrong. If you’re a healthcare organization and you can’t be down, cloud recovery is a very attractive solution.”

Healthcare organizations need to have a flexible disaster recovery tool in place that can adjust to any situation where data is compromised. The elasticity of DRaaS solutions give organizations a much faster and complete data recovery experience.