Cary F. McGovern

Iron Mountain’s Dig­i­tal Record Cen­ter for Med­ical Images is designed to back up and archive dig­i­tal med­ical infor­ma­tion, which often includes large, bulky X-ray files. Due to the sen­si­tiv­ity and impor­tance of med­ical data, another level of redun­dancy is built into the package.

As data stor­age gets more sophis­ti­cated, with intel­li­gent tier­ing, auto­matic dedu­pli­ca­tion and other emi­nently use­ful fea­tures, some ven­dors are begin­ning to fine-tune their stor­age prod­ucts for use in spe­cific ver­ti­cal mar­kets such as health care and finance.

For exam­ple, Iron Moun­tain on March 1 revealed a newly upgraded ver­sion of its cloud stor­age ser­vice specif­i­cally for med­ical records. The com­pany made the announce­ment at the HIMSS Health­care IT Con­fer­ence and Exhi­bi­tion in Boston.

IM’s Dig­i­tal Record Cen­ter for Med­ical Images is designed to back up and archive dig­i­tal med­ical infor­ma­tion, which often includes large, bulky X-ray files.

Due to the impor­tant and sen­si­tive nature of med­ical data, another level of redun­dancy is built into the package.

IM claims that this spe­cial­ized ver­sion of its ser­vice pro­vides higher lev­els of flex­i­bil­ity, increased scal­a­bil­ity, and bet­ter access and secu­rity than its stan­dard cloud stor­age because it adds an optional on-site stor­age com­po­nent to work with the exist­ing cloud service.

The com­pany also said health care orga­ni­za­tions can con­fig­ure the ser­vice to meet access and dis­as­ter recov­ery requirements.

Dig­i­tal Record Cen­ter for Med­ical Images offers these new capa­bil­i­ties, as listed by Iron Mountain:

New Ser­vice Options—three ser­vice plans for meet­ing orga­ni­za­tions’ unique needs for pro­tec­tion and redun­dancy: Mir­rored Cloud, stor­ing two copies of each med­ical image off­site; Hybrid Cloud, stor­ing one copy onsite and one off­site; and Hybrid Cloud2, stor­ing a sin­gle copy onsite and two copies offsite.

Data Shut­tle Service—allows orga­ni­za­tions to move large vol­umes of data to Iron Mountain’s data cen­ter faster than they could over the Internet.

Optional Onsite Storage—In addi­tion to cloud stor­age, a copy of archived data can also be stored onsite, enabling local access to archives while pro­vid­ing a sec­ond copy for disaster-recovery purposes.

Dig­i­tal Record Cen­ter for Med­ical Images is avail­able now.