Apollo Indraprastha Secures Critical Data through Ace Data solution

Profile: Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, New Delhi is the First Hospital in India to be Internationally Accredited by Joint Commission International (JCI). It is one of the best multi-speciality tertiary acute care hospitals with over 700 beds in India and the most sought after destination in SAARC region for healthcare delivery. With over 8500 beds across 50 hospitals within and outside India, the group is one of the largest healthcare groups in Asia and has some of the best hospitals in India. The legacy of touching lives stems from the four pillars of our philosophy- experience, excellence, expertise and research.
General Insights
Healthcare industry has always suffered the heaviest impact from explosive data growth which has become common in every industry without any exceptions. As the enormous technical innovations take place targeting the delivery of better service for users of healthcare services, the problem with increasing complexity and variety of data has imposed itself to the very core of the competitive strengths of the healthcare providers, threatening their future ability to perform well.

Healthcare industry has always suffered the heaviest impact from explosive data growth which has become common in every industry without any exceptions. As the enormous technical innovations take place targeting the delivery of better service for users of healthcare services, the problem with increasing complexity and variety of data has imposed itself to the very core of the competitive strengths of the healthcare providers, threatening their future ability to perform well.

Challenge

Quality service knows no error in system procedures. That is why Apollo Hospitals driven by its vision and the future wellbeing of its clients undertook the next logical step by embracing the Cloud to make the future horizons greener, and their patients happier.

Apollo Hospital was using a tape based solution for the backup of Fileserver, Exchange and Microsoft SQL databases. This involved the physical media management as well as a lot of manual effort to monitor and manage the backups.

Tape based backup often require strong arm and muscles, literally. At the time of product evaluation, Apollo Hospitals had a copy of its business critical data on more than 1.000 tape cartridges that required proper handling, storage, inventorying and protection from various internal and external disruptors.

Because of the nature of the tape based backup, a certain excess of tapes was always required in the Tape Library before the start of the backup process so that the backups complete on time. In case of skipping the tape insertion process the backups used to run for long time, thereby increasing the Backup Window.

The full backup was being taken on daily basis which required a lot of physical media as well as a long Backup Window.

The Mission Impossible!

Imagine the importance of hundreds of small patient scanning images that are produced every day within a hospital facility. These images can be generated from various scanning devices or systems within the hospital like the Digital Radiography System – DRS. The backup of these numerous small images is IMPOSSIBLE due to the length of the process. This is a serious problem for every healthcare provider and so far tape based backup approach did not resolve it, leaving the institution without secondary copy of this important data. Most DRS systems come without integrated PACS ability, and a hospital can produce vast number of these small size images every day.

This was the scenario with Apollo Hospitals as well as with many other healthcare institutions across India and the Globe. Tape based backup approach of these images takes enormous amount of time to be completed because these files are numerous and small and hence, creating an index for each one of them on the tape is the main time consuming operation. Therefore the backup of these files often takes more than 24 hours and most of these files remain non backed up, jeopardizing the hospitals’ ability to fully comply to government healthcare regulation policies including HIPPA. The story is identical as with the recovery requests because with the sequential read-write of tapes, it would take hours to locate a single image in the pool of PACS images.

Solution

In order for the traditional problems of this traditional Backup solution to be resolved, Backup Vault backup solution was proposed. Backup Vault is first fully managed; fully automated Cloud based Backup solution in India, giving its users the Peace of mind they were longing for. The SLA driven Backup Vault is designed to free the IT administrators from problems of managing agents, backup schedules and policies and multiple media for daily backups. It is a Cloud based solution with 256 bit encryption and highly available Tier-3 data center to backup the data.

Backup Vault enabled Apollo Hospitals to define the backup sets, time frequency of the backup and type of data that the user need to protect in every environment, physical or virtual. Initially the Microsoft SQL database wаs backed up using the Backup Vault solution. The databases are being backed up four times a day every 6 hours due to the sensitivity and importance of this type of data, carrying only changed particles of data to our Data center via IP WAN.

Benefits

The problem with protection of numerous small PACS images was fully resolved for Apollo Hospitals by implementing CDP (Continuous Data Protection) approach for backup of PACS files only. The system generated a monthly folder for the current month as well as daily folder for every day of the month where images from the current day were stored and organized, enabling compliance with industry’s data protection standards. Under the umbrella of CDP, the Backup process is initiated every 3 minutes for backup of freshly generated PACS files. In other words, PACS images are being backed up the same day they are generated.

Since large part of this data is kept for compliance reason, Apollo Hospitals does not require it for daily activities and requests, and keeping this data on high availability devices is economically irrational. Therefore an archival solution was proposed and implemented that archived older versions of digital images on low cost disk. Apollo has a requirement of backup of 18 months old PACS data from which 12 months data is stored online and subsequent 6 months data is being archived, thus reducing the costs and aligning the value of the data with the cost of protecting it.

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