SOLUTION PROVIDER Q&A Sponsored Content


Data Protection for SaaS: Why and how to back up data from the cloud services


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Doug Ricketts Senior Technical Account Manager


Synology


ith more organizations keeping important data stored in cloud services, it’s impor- tant to understand the retention policies of these services and the potential threats that can lead to permanent loss of


data stored in the cloud. Doug Ricketts, Senior Technical Account Manager at


Synology participated in a Fireside Chat at Healthcare Innovation’s California Summit on November 3 in Los Angeles, CA at the Sofitel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills.


Why is it important to have a backup of your data? Imagine a world where your SaaS [software as a service] provider for some reason loses the ability to actually relay and transmit data to and from your environment. And when that happens, we have a few different issues. First, HIPAA really allows us to watch safety requirements and empowers us as a company to be vigilant in the way that we provide data to our end users, our patients. And therefore, ultimately, if you can’t do that, you have to have a contingency plan. There has to be a backup. And the way that we do that is by having the data on premise or in another part of the cloud—meaning cloud to cloud. From a cloud-to-cloud perspective, there’s a number


of benefits that you can think about. The first and biggest one is infrastructure management. Having a cloud-to- cloud replication strategy means that ultimately, there’s less replication directly to your environment. And so, your IT admins don’t have to work as hard to actually manage the infrastructure. In addition to the staffing and loca- tion, there’s the ability to let someone else step in and be more productive and efficient regarding time—keeping a patient’s communication solution, basically, up and operational, is an expense, and very important in this [healthcare] environment.


Can you please discuss long-term strategies regarding backing up data? First and foremost, we have to take time planning out how we’re going to approach strategies that are involved with securing our data. And also, the rapid growth of data is


out there. There was a recent study that says healthcare data is growing at 32 percent year over year, which is an astronomical amount of growth, in general. When you’re replicating all that data to a SaaS provider, it should still be on premise as well. Let’s talk about long-term archiving, if you’re able to


archive on premise, you’re able to save a substantial amount of funds because a lot of those funds are going directly to the cloud provider in order to archive that data within the cloud. One of the downsides to the matter is that it actually costs a lot more to archive your data and it actually costs a lot more to push and grab that data from that provider.


So, is it important to think through the longer-term implications rather than, let’s say, month to month? Absolutely. Now, when we are looking at a solution, we’re always looking at the three-to-five-year plan. I think any solutions architect in the IT industry wants to look about three years and five years of planning for technical reasons. Data is going to grow in an environment and the way you approach that data, you don’t want to have to constantly change how you backup that data. You have to plan long term and look at the system requirements that are right in front of you. But you also have to think about the ones that aren’t.


There’s a lot of noise and hype in this industry, how can you figure out a strategy that will work for your organization? It’s so difficult. And I think from the requirements perspec- tive, it all starts right there. You have to be able to sit down with the client, just like a physician sits down with a patient. You have to ask the right questions. With almost any patient at the doctor, he or she starts by asking them, “What’s going on? How are you feeling?” And that then gives them the ability to explain or expand further and look into those symptoms. And ultimately, to figure out the diagnosis. The same goes for engineering, but there’s really no right or wrong for a facility when it comes to figuring out a strategy.


www.synology.com/en-us


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