Backup and Recovery for Healthcare IT Environments

Modern Healthcare backup and recovery software from Bacula Systems. Reliable, highly scalable and customizable backup solution for Health and Medical organizations.

IT Departments deploying Healthcare services need to be efficient, innovative and highly secure. Bacula helps to protect and modernize their business by meeting these needs, together with technology that is especially relevant to the Healthcare industry.

Today’s Healthcare sector is seeing significant change, with new services and features offered by IT services, across multiple user-types. For example, identifying and utilizing technological solutions that will make clinical trials and healthcare delivery more accessible for patients. This means reaching a broader spectrum of patient, including those who live in remote areas, have unusually high work commitments or are caregivers.  Regulatory reforms are underway in the wake of Covid-19, in part to increase agility and flexibility in the industry. Improvements are being seen in the industry in areas such as remote monitoring, electronic data capture and patient registries, becoming more efficient and effective than ever before. All of this positive change is expected to help patients. With this positive change comes a pressing need to implement high performance, cost-effective, highly secure and robust backup and recovery solutions into these IT infrastructures. However, many backup software vendors are typically inflexible, offer limited customization, encourage expensive proprietary global systems and brazenly promote vendor lock-in.

Through its design, its depth and its licensing model, Bacula Enterprise backup and recovery software is structured to significantly contribute to solving this problem where data backup, recovery and disaster recovery are concerned, helping Healthcare providers to be more far more efficient, secure and competitive. Contact Bacula to find out more about its Healthcare customers, and how they benefit from Bacula’s high security, low cost backup and recovery.

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WORM Storage Compatibility with Bacula

Electronically stored information (ESI) is data that is created, altered, communicated and stored in digital form. For example, in the more regulated industries such as government sectors and healthcare services, many regulators require that organizations capture and record text messages, as well as archive voice calls- among other types of mobile content – and store those records in unalterable formats. With WORM storage, only an act of willful (physical) destruction can remove information from physical media before the set retention date. Many systems archive information, and this is a very important first step; however, in the highly regulated healthcare industry, ESI usually needs to be stored in this secure format. This enables healthcare companies and public agencies to comply with the record keeping requirements of different regulators.

ACSLS

ACSLS benefits end users by allowing them to consolidate their library resources, load balance them, and fully utilize their available storage capacity. This eliminates the need to purchase additional direct-attach libraries while other dedicated libraries at the user’s disposal remain only partially used. The resulting library architecture can help reduce capital equipment, maintenance, and personnel costs. Dynamic configuration capabilities help reduce downtime. There’s also the ability to swap drives, add library expansion modules, and change other hardware configurations without impact to the greater storage environment. Bacula integrates with ACSLS in that it is fully supported, and allows the user to exploit the entire function range of Bacula in the context of very large tape libraries in conjunction with ACSLS.

ACSLS complements Bacula to share tape storage equipment between different backup application installations, and enables tape storage to not only share between Bacula instances, but also other applications.

Deduplication

Global Endpoint Deduplication™ capabilities (from the client to the storage) or universal deduplication feature to maximize speed of cloud disaster recovery, minimize network bandwidth utilization and hardware investment

Sybase Compatibility

AP’s Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise is widely used by healthcare institutions. It has a range of qualities highly applicable to healthcare organizations, such as online transaction processing (OLTP) capabilities. Sybase has, historically, a comprehensive portfolio of applications that enable healthcare organizations to optimize processes, collaborate more effectively, compete more successfully, and comply with government regulations . One such regulation is HIPAA, a US federal law that governs the privacy and security of Personal Health Information (PHI). Bacula integrates closely to back up both Sybase applications and its data – massively increasing efficiency and intruducing drastic reductions in cost.

DB2… and More.

Bacula’s ability to natively integrate with DB2, scale readily and customize easily are key factors why the healthcare industry is increasingly using  Bacula’s features to backup and recovery DB2 and its data.

Bacula has a particularly high level of support for open source databases, which are typically of low cost, are well tunable and accordingly quite scalable for high throughput (if needed, sometimes even by just running many small instances side by side). Bacula not only supports cutting edge technologies such as containers and new tapes of VM’s, but also understands and usually is compatible with more ’conservative’ technologies as well; large NAS appliances such as NetApp and traditional Unix systems.

File Limitation Tools

Bacula’s File size and file number limitations provide better management of commercial backup as a service offerings.

Cloud Interface Connectivity

Bacula has native cloud integration, via the S3, S3-IA, Azure, Oracle Cloud, AWS and Google Cloud interfaces.

State of the art Security: Advanced Ransomware Protection

• FIPS 140-2 compliant
• Data encryption cipher (AES 128, AES192, AES256 or blowfish) and the digest algorithm
• Windows Encrypting File System (EFS)
• Verify the reliability of existing backed up data or detect Silent Data Corruption
• Verification of files previously catalogued, including a Tripwire like capability (system break-in detection)
• SHA256 and SHA512 signature for increased assurance in Verify jobs for detecting file modification
• CRAM-MD5 password authentication between each component (daemon)
• Configurable TLS (SSL) communications encryption between each component
• Configurable Data (on Volume) encryption on a Client by Client basis
• Computation of MD5 or SHA1 signatures of the file data if requested
• Automatic use of TLS for all network communications (can be turned off)
• Unique system architecture for especially strong protection against ransomware
• Immutable disk volume feature
• bconsole option to connect to ldap directory in order to protect its access

Snapshots

Snapshot management capabilities to take snapshots of data and back them up without any interruption of an MSPs services — a fast, easy and non-intrusive way to ensure smooth managed backup of their customer’s data. Bacula Enterprise automatically handles snapshots, backing up a consistent point-in-time image of the MSPs systems. Bacula offers snapshot support across a wide range of operating systems and environments, including Windows, Unix and Linux platforms. The following snapshot-capable file systems and logical volume managers are supported:

• ZFS
• BTRFS
• LVM

Comprehensive Coverage of Virtual Machines

Bacula’s clientless virtual machine backup includes VMware, Hyper-V, Red Hat Virtualization, Xen, KVM Nutanix and Proxmox. It also provides a variety of fast and flexible recovery options, including entire virtual machines (VMs) and application items. Our virtual server backup software offers further performance and efficiency gains via Global Endpoint Deduplication, and a range of other specific controls. Bacula Systems offers the most comprehensive VM hypervisor support in the industry.

Comprehensive coverage of Container Environments

Bacula Enterprise is the world’s first high-end, high availability Physical, Virtual and Cloud solution to deliver state of the art, fully featured Kubernetes Docker, Tanzu and certified Red Hat OpenShift backup – including volume snapshots. Bacula’s advanced Kubernetes and OpenShift backup and restore capabilities makes container orchestration more easy to deploy, increasing value to your organization. This technology also includes protection of persistent volumes, and provides a vast choice of customizable options for schema and architecture.

Suggested Action Items

1. Seriously consider the sustainability of continuing to pay data volume-related licensing fees to your current vendor
2. Appraise whether your current vendor’s software has the agility, modularity, stability and progressive technical road map that you need
3. Assess your organization’s experiences with the vendor’s support team, and if it meets satisfactory levels
4. Consider ROI on your backup and recovery solution, and the finance department’s ability to forecast its cost into the future, in view of your projected increase in data volume
5. Define whether your backup and recovery software vendor presents the tools and processes needed for a dynamic, hybrid environment that is best suited for future needs

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Backup for Healthcare whitepaper