Goulburn Valley Health operates an acute and extended care facility in the regional centre of Shepparton, Victoria. It provides surgical, medical, paediatric, obstetrics and gynaecology, intensive care and psychiatry services.
Using a Health Information System (HIS) solution from 3M, the hospital collects and scans a large amount of sensitive clinical data on behalf of its patients which is a critical input into patient care and treatment. They turned to Kytec to design, implement and proactively manage a data protection solution that was secure, reliable, offered full redundancy and was able to recover data quickly in case of a network or device outage.
The key Challenges
Goulburn Valley Health had two key challenges around their critical data: data availability and data protection. They needed to ensure that if external factors such as power outages, floods, fire, ransomware attack, etc impacted their IT infrastructure, their data would be secure and that it could be made available quickly so the hospital operations could continue. They also needed to ensure that their critical and patient data was archived and protected over the long term.
Goulbourn Valley Health (GVH) had in place, a system for scanning and manually entering a large number of clinical patient records. But the system soon became complex and resulted in a heterogeneous data environment that was hard to troubleshoot, manage, back up, maintain and integrity couldn’t be ensured. Inherent was the potential for downtime which would significantly impact the operation of the hospital.
GVH looked for a solution that ensured data protection and was able to manage back up and disaster recovery. As a first step, GVH spoke to Kytec about their business requirements and data protection strategy and policies.
Solution
Specialising in Cisco technology, Kytec partnered with GVH to implement a Cisco combined with Veeam solution that was fully redundant, allowed full visibility of physical and virtual devices and was able to perform data/server recovery in the case of network or device outages. The Cisco validated solution included Cisco UCS servers, storage and Cisco fabric switches, located in the GVH data centre.
The data protection platform includes Veeam Backup and Replication to manage backup requirements and Veeam ONE as a monitoring platform for their physical and virtual infrastructure.
Results
The fully scalable Kytec solution can fully recover and restore data in less than 15 minutes in case of an outage so the hospital’s operations can be maintained. A longer term storage solution, with a different refresh cycle was implemented for data archiving. There is also an option for GVH to restore to the public cloud which provides another option for redundancy.
Rob Sands, Applications and Systems Manager: “Kytec is not only a service provider to GVH, it is also a trusted advisor and will provide advice and solutions for the next phase of our IT evolution as we move more workloads to the cloud”.
Kytec provided a managed services solution to GVH which not only means support, but proactive monitoring using a dashboard with in-built alerts to identify any problems even before GVH becomes aware of them.