01-31-14 | Blog Post
On Tuesday, the Michigan chapter of AFCOM held a meeting at Jackson National Life in Lansing, MI. AFCOM is an association working to help advance data center and facilities management professionals around the world. They do this through research, magazines, conferences, and the educational meetings of local chapters. In the morning Brendan Nageotte from Schneider Electric spoke about DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) systems. After lunch Online Tech’s Director of Product Management Jason Yaeger spoke in tandem with Jeff Jaskot, Director of Infrastructure Operations of Henry Ford Health System about the choice of Henry Ford to colocate their disaster recovery solution with Online Tech.
Jeff started by giving a brief overview of Henry Ford Health System (HFHS), and explained that they were made up of 5 hospitals, all located in Michigan, but with 140 sites maintained on their network. There were many drivers, he continued, that led to a change in the disaster recovery plan Henry Ford had in place. Recently HFHS had moved from an in-house EMR system to Epic, which is a large investment they wanted to protect. Also, they are undergoing a large renovation of their production site, and wanted the added protection of a robust disaster recovery implementation through that process.
The choice to colocate with Online Tech was motivated by Online Tech’s focus on compliance (in this case HIPAA), the speed, cost savings, and flexibility of colocating vs. building, and the convenience of additional ‘smart hands’ when needed. The time it would take to build vs. colocating also played a major role in the decision made by Henry Ford.
Not only did Jeff and the Henry Ford Health System receive an improved DR solution, but they were able to take advantage of Online Tech in ways that could help with the renovations in their production site: “I consider this the model for the way the production data center should look”, Jeff explained.
Find out more about Online Tech’s disaster recovery solution here.
More Resources:
Top 5 Vendor Questions When Outsourcing Your IT Infrastructure in 2014– With 2013 wrapping up and 2014 close on the horizon, many organizations are reviewing their IT infrastructure needs. For some, it’s an active, ongoing conversation; others wish they could sweep that discussion under the desk for another year. Regardless of your business objectives, you and your organization need to explore these questions to find the right vendor to entrust with your IT infrastructure needs.
HIPAA Compliant Recommendations to Securing ePHI with Mobile Devices-The Dept. of Health & Human Services has a HIPAA security guide outlining their recommendations for securing ePHI (electronic protected health information) on mobile devices, including remote access. The HHS covers ePHI in a variety of instances ranging from accessing, storing and transmitting data.
The Great Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Checklist-According to ZDNet.com, there are a few checklist items to look for when shopping for an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) provider, as they wrote about in Finding the Ideal IaaS Provider. I supplied some commentary on our perspective as a secure IaaS hosting provider.
