DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors in Storage for Healthcare Solutions report. This report provides guidance on TOP 5 solutions healthcare organizations should consider for to meet their storage requirements.
Storage for Healthcare Challenges
Healthcare IT must tackle significantly more challenging data handling requirements than most enterprises. In this environment, data storage is perhaps the most difficult architectural component to structure and operate both effectively for the mission and correctly for security. Not only is ultra-high availability, remote collaboration and fast data access critical to treating patients and achieving good patient outcomes, but data protection needs to be paramount. And both compliance and data privacy regulations ensure that healthcare IT has a lot of demanding work also cut out for them in managing data access, integrity/retention and disaster recovery.
Because of these challenges, healthcare is lagging behind many industries in IT modernization efforts. But there is incredible opportunity. Many healthcare organizations have now adopted key transformation initiatives in providing connected/remote care, conduct clinical and population health analysis, coordinate patent care across locations, improve patient engagement and foster more personalized/precision medicine.
Specific healthcare workloads requiring aligned modern data storage can include PACs/ VNA (medical imaging and image archives), telemedicine/telehealth distance sharing and collaboration (VDI etc.), EMR/EHR (patient records) and big data powered research analytics. These applications require local performant access to large media files (both images and video streams), secure sharing and collaboration across distances, and large on-line archives.
Imagine a common radiology scenario in which a successful patient outcome might depend on accessing and sharing a critical patient medical image in real-time between a hospital and an off-site pathologist. Large image data needs to be available on-demand, the image application needs fast streaming quality access, and online sharing needs to be supported and secured—all can be challenges for healthcare IT stuck with weak data storage solutions.
In another common scenario, patient health records may be hard to access even internally (much less transferred to the point of patient care) due to overburdened or legacy storage systems that are still in use because of the fear of meeting legal compliance or security concerns (i.e. protecting data in a cloud or cloud-like distributed system).
Benefits of an Effective Storage for Healthcare Solution
The modern storage solutions evaluated in this report all have features that address IT modernization challenges and concerns. From a healthcare business perspective, they support and enable many of the desired healthcare IT initiatives mentioned above. For example, these storage solutions can be used to modernize and consolidate unstructured file data storage that is often found locked inside aging NAS arrays local to each hospital data center. By aggregating such data into a more global, distributed “file system”, data management policies can be applied immediately and universally while ensuring wide secure access for collaboration and sharing. Many of the solutions address performance with “edge” devices that can provide flash-speed streaming media access to local applications.
It’s hard to imagine truly proving compliance and really protecting critical data without the support of a modern healthcare storage solution that can natively capture immutable copies, audit access, enforce retention/deletion, and recover on-demand. Storage with native compliance features and policy-based management directly address the data concerns found in HIPAA, HITECH, GDPR, PIPEDA and other regulations. In addition, data with provable integrity proves a better foundation to ensure healthcare insurance and billing are correct, defensible and complete.
Cost is a major concern in the healthcare industry, data storage can become a significant expense and useful medical data is growing at an exponential rate. The best storage solutions can help address growing storage cost/capacity concerns with features like deduplication, copy reduction, inherent snapshots or built-in backup/archive. Some will tier from flash all the way down to tape, while most enable integration to cloud storage to take advantage of utility scale and pricing. And top storage solutions will make storage management easier on staff with many consolidating end-to-end storage management into a single pane-of-glass.
Finally, data protection requires security from both hackers and insider threats. Encryption features are critical. And ransomware attacks can be a life or death issue in healthcare. Top storage solutions will offer native features to help protect and/or recover quickly from ransomware attacks like immutable snapshots, WORM options, and quick restore to fine-grained recovery points.
Storage for Healthcare Solutions
In preparing this report, DCIG evaluated sixteen storage solutions for the healthcare use-case. The general feature categories evaluated include:
- Deployment capabilities
- Data protection
- Product and performance management
- Documentation Support
- Technical support
- Licensing and pricing
Based on its evaluation of these features, the following rising vendors earned a DCIG TOP 5 award for their storage solutions:
- Nasuni
- Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform
- Qumulo File Data Platform
- VAST Data Universal Storage
- WekaIO
Report Availability
The full DCIG TOP 5 report is available for download immediately at the link below. The full report contains additional details such as:
- A listing of all sixteen solutions evaluated
- Distinguishing features of storage for healthcare
- Similarities among the DCIG TOP 5 solutions
- Differences between the DCIG TOP 5 solutions
- A profile of each solution that highlights notable features that earned it a DCIG TOP 5 award
Qumulo has licensed the right to distribute this report. Individuals may access the full report at no cost by following the link below.
Qumulo: 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors in Storage for Healthcare Solutions
Confidentiality and Copyright
Other than excerpts published in this announcement, the contents of the 2022-23 DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors in Storage for Healthcare Solutions report are copyrighted and may not be republished without permission.
DCIG will release more TOP 5 reports in the weeks and months to come. Please sign up for the weekly DCIG Newsletter to receive notice of their availability.
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