Recently healthcare records at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey were compromised when a laptop containing 840,000 member records was stolen. While theft can happen even to the most security conscious person or organization, the critical mistake was not encrypting the data on the device, which is what happened in this case according to a report by Network World. If that was not bad enough, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has severe penalties when it comes to compromising personal data. Penalties for privacy breaches can extend to $25,000 and criminal penalties for misuse of information can reach as high as $250,000 and a 10-year prison term.
In order to avoid any of the unfortunate incidents that befell the organization in New Jersey, University of Utah Health Care (UHHC) is implementing the Sepaton S2100. Sepaton, maker of fast and scalable data protection solutions for large enterprises, will provide UHHC with the requirements for meeting HIPPA regulations and improving its efficiency of data protection.
The Sepaton solution is able to protect massive amounts of data while at the same time cutting backup times in half. With this platform UHHC can replace legacy systems for its duplication solutions with a more efficient long-term and higher volume storage solution. The S2100 provides up to 3:1 capacity reclamation on their largest Oracle database and as much as 5.7:1 overall.
Healthcare organizations around the country are digitizing their entire operations and this requires the right duplication and storage solution to ensure the data is protected and it meets HIPAA requirements. As the leading healthcare system affiliated with the University of Utah, UHHC backs up close to 15 TB/day and 1.7-2.0 PB per month, which is a large amount of data.
The organization manages and protects a total of 7 PB of data from both the University and healthcare organizations. This information is backed up, staged and copied to tape for long-term storage to comply with HIPAA.
Sepaton provides flexibility for backing up data with NetBackup OpenStorage (OST) on 1- and 10-Gb Ethernet and virtual tape library (VTL) emulation on Fibre Channel. It supports all leading backup applications and Symantec-certified support for the following NetBackup OST features:
- Auto Image Replication (A.I.R.)
- Optimized Synthetic Backups over TCP/IP
- Granular Restore Technology (GRT)
- NetBackup Accelerator
The platform is three times faster for backup performance than any competing solution with pay-as-you-grow scalability that eliminates sprawl while reducing IT costs.
"We had a non-scalable deduplication system, but we outgrew it in 4 months. Since our data volumes are growing at approximately 20 percent annually, we needed a system that could scale out to meet our needs. We were always moving data off the disk to reclaim capacity. It was a management nightmare. Performance also suffered as its inline deduplication slowed the backup process as data volumes grew,” said Rung Chuon, systems administrator, UUHSC.
Edited by
Ryan Sartor
