3 minutes read

Since the world turned upside down with COVID, McKinsey & Company has been tracking the sentiments of US small and mid-size businesses (SMB). These statistics show that 57% of SMBs report a lack of customers or do not know when customers will come back, and 84% of SMBs say the Coronavirus has negatively impacted their income.

Small and mid-sized businesses are already enduring so many challenges in the wake of COVID. Downtime doesn’t need to be one of them.

What is downtime?

Businesses don’t always realize the ripple effect of downtime, but it can have a significant impact on customers, patients, and your bottom line.

Downtime refers to the inability to access critical business applications like sales processing, CRM, or email. For healthcare practices, it might be patient records or digital imaging. Without access to these tools – or even with slow access – businesses rack up a lot of additional costs while losing time, productivity, and customer (or patient) loyalty!

The right data storage

Establishing the right Storage Area Network (SAN) is a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to keeping your critical systems running quickly, smoothly and securely. Most SMBs already have an established SAN, and chances are, it runs seamlessly in the background – until it doesn’t.

When should you replace your SAN?

Typically a SAN lasts roughly six years, but that timeline could be shorter depending on your business. High growth and larger application systems could have you evaluating a new SAN. When the time comes to replace your SAN, our own in-house HPE Nimble storage expert, Jason Finkelstein, wants you to consider these questions:

Can your current SAN guarantee less than 1-minute downtime?

What if I told you with an HPE Nimble Storage array, you could get 99.9999% guaranteed uptime? But what does 6-Nines mean? Well, with 6-Nines, you are getting a guarantee that the array will not be down more than 2 seconds/month and 31.5 seconds per year.

How can HPE Nimble Storage arrays offer this?

HPE Nimble Storage arrays come with HPE’s Infosight technology. Infosight is an artificial intelligence (AI) cloud-based platform that provides predictive analytics and machine learning. Infosight can predict and resolve 86% of problems before your business is impacted. You can think of Infosight as the first layers of tech support, watching over your systems 24/7. With Infosight analyzing and correlating millions of sensors every second, all customers benefit as their systems get smarter, this ensures their 99.9999% uptime.

Since Infosight is acting as your Tier 1 and Tier 2 support team, any calls you might have to make to the support desk automatically connects you to a Tier 3 support technician.

This direct escalation of support means faster, more focused issue resolution with the peace-of-mind knowing systems will be up and running before morning when everyone starts logging in. With this intuitive, Infosight technology, you’ll often receive a call about an issue before you realize it’s an issue.

Finally, since Infosight is looking at more than just the storage array, it can alert you to other types of issues as well. More than 56% of the problems that Infosight detects and resolves are outside of the array. For example, misconfigurations inside VMware, network issues with ISCSI, or just a server bottleneck issue.

What about upgrades?

With HPE Nimble Storage arrays, all upgrades and expansions can be completed during the day. Improve your productivity by not having to schedule a complete downtime to upgrade firmware, add an expansion shelf, or even install a more powerful controller.

How much is this going to cost me?

The nice thing about HPE Nimble Storage arrays is that all features and licenses are included. The 6-Nines guarantee is a standard benefit on all arrays and is guaranteed as long as the product is supported.

Some of the licenses and features include:

• Deduplication
• Compression
• Encryption
• Always-on App Centric Data Services

Other interesting features for your consideration are:

• Timeless – Controller refresh every three years, with a guarantee 25% performance increase
• dHCI – Hyperconverged Solution

Path Forward: An MSP with a deep bench of experience

For nearly 20 years, Path Forward IT experts have been providing concierge-level 24/7/ 365 IT support to businesses across the US. With that breadth of experience, our dedicated engineers and technicians can quickly hone in on an issue, provide strategic guidance in planning and growing your enterprise, or simply help you select the right hardware to replace end-of-life equipment.  Contact us for more information about our HPE Nimble offering and IT Services.

3 minutes read

Wildfire season is upon us in the West. Hurricane season is underway in the East. It’s never a good time for your healthcare practice to go offline, but for it to happen during a global pandemic would be especially devastating for your patients and your practice.

Patients need peace-of-mind knowing they can reach their providers despite natural disasters.

Experts Predict Highly Active Seasons for 2020

Last year, wildfires in California and across other states in the West caused massive destruction, forcing communities to evacuate and businesses to close temporarily, including many healthcare facilities. Having fewer options puts a strain on those facilities that are still open. Ultimately, it’s the patients and closed practices that suffer most.

The 2020 hurricane season only just started, and already it’s breaking records. Beyond the high winds and loss of power, the threat of the aftermath is just as dangerous. Flooding that threatens buildings and equipment, and downed trees that block roadways can last long beyond the storm itself.

Preparedness Pays Off

Disaster recovery isn’t much different than insurance, except insurance coverage is clearly written out, stating exactly what is or isn’t covered. You can choose the level of reimbursement you would get if the worst-case scenario happened to you. With disaster recovery (DR) planning, it isn’t as clear, but it can be.

DR planning is more than paying a quarterly premium. It’s something that needs continuous monitoring, testing, and adjusting. Done well, it will save your practice time, money, and ensure your patients are getting the care they expect.

Here are a couple of real examples from healthcare practices we work with that underscore how valuable a thoughtful backup and recovery plan can be. 

Can Your Patients Reach Your Practice During a Power Outage?

When it comes to being prepared, most people only think of data backup and recovery. We helped this group of orthopaedic practices create a plan for preventing any disruption to their patient access.

Last August, the California wildfires were burning near a popular orthopaedic group. Electricity was shut down in the area for several days due to the high winds and risk of sparking new fires. Yet in the face of this adversity:

• Our clients didn’t have to shut their practices down.
• Even without electricity, they didn’t miss a single patient call because they use our iVY cloud-based phone system and geographically diverse iVY call associates. These highly-trained agents represent the practice and schedule directly into their EHR.
• Agents contacted every patient with an appointment and made new accommodations.
• Patients continued to receive excellent care, and the practices didn’t have any downtime.

How Quickly Can You Restore Patient Records?

Data backup is critical to being able to get back to seeing and treating patients. Our Patient Shield team works with healthcare practices to design data backup plans specifically for EHR systems. Most practices don’t realize some options allow providers to continue to see patients, access, and update patient records in the EHR, even in recovery mode. It only works if you have it set up before you need it.

Our Patient Shield team works with several health networks in Florida and has seen first-hand the benefits of a solid DR plan.

Last year, hurricane Dorian was on track to make landfall right over the city where one of our clients operates. With the benefit of an established DR plan and a conscientious DR team, this practice didn’t experience any data loss.

Our Patient Shield team worked around the clock, in constant contact with the practice, including daily calls reviewing backups, offsite data transfers, and DR plans. When the tropical storm surges hit, the practice felt confident their data was protected.

Don’t Be Afraid. Be Ready.

Preparing for the worst-case scenario can protect your business and provide a sense of security for your patients. A disaster recovery plan for a healthcare practice looks a little different than a standard plan. There are a lot of considerations to ensure compliance with HIPAA rules for the backup, storage, and recovery of data. There are also your patients to consider. They like knowing they can reach your practice even when facing the adversity of a force of nature.

To learn more, contact a Patient Shield team member to set up a consultation for a comprehensive, healthcare-specific DR plan.

3 minutes read

If you don’t have strong data protection in place today, you are underestimating some serious risks. So far, in 2020, ransomware attacks have already cost healthcare practices nearly $160 million – and we’re only halfway through the year.

In the healthcare sector, ransomware is responsible for shutting down clinics, hospitals, and severely affecting patient care. The implications are dangerous during normal times, and to navigate this during the COVID pandemic carries exponentially more risk.

All Types of Businesses are Targets

Healthcare isn’t the only alluring target for cybercriminals. City governments and municipalities are getting hit too and with an unfortunate rate of success. Small businesses are also a favorite target, with 71% of ransomware attacks targeting small businesses. These attacks are expensive. By the end of 2019, the average ransomware payment topped $80,000, which explains why 1 in 5 businesses hit with ransomware go out of business.

No entity or industry sector is off-limits. The reality is, your company is also at risk, just like the ones making news headlines.

Risks Go Beyond Ransomware

Ransomware is just one of the many factors that can stop your business in its tracks and turn your world upside down. Hardware failure, application failure, file corruption, human error, and Mother Nature are all real risks that require immediate consideration. Robust data protection is as critical to your business as healthy financials.

Staying Protected

The reality is that even with protection, there are risks. It is critical to understand those risks and minimize them with a balance of solutions that are the right fit and cost to your company.

Here are some questions to guide you in determining the best solution for your environment:

1. What are your goals for RPO/RTO ?
2. What are your goals for data retention?
3. Are your backups encrypted?
4. Is your protected data stored in more than one place?
5. If so, can your backups run from a secondary location?
6. Are all of your critical applications protected?
7. Does your company have a disaster plan?
8. Are your backups application-aware?

The Right Stuff

Your backup environment is not a book on a shelf that you can look at every few years. Like your production environment, it is continuously and rapidly changing. Think of it more like a virtual data center. Putting backups in place and waiting for failures is not adequate protection. You can’t pick out a solution, set it up, and consider it complete. It is something that needs to be continuously managed, just like your production data.

Validation

Automated backup validation can’t be 100% trusted. If you are not manually validating your backups regularly, it is the same as not being backed up at all. Often, important aspects of the technical environment are overlooked. It’s crucial to validate backups for:

• All applications including cloud applications
• EMR, SQL databases
• O365 environments

Don’t wait for a disaster to find out how well your validation process is working. It’s essential to know your company or healthcare practice is completely protected before a disaster strikes. The best way to navigate these risks and headaches is to partner with experts who solely focus on data protection, as opposed to it being one item on a long to-do list for an internal team member.

Key Partnerships

The best partners understand your business, are transparent about your risks, invested in your success, and 100% focused on data protection. That’s what the Patient Shield team at Path Forward does 24/7, 365 days of the year.  We have a team of certified engineers that solely focus on your data protection, security, and risk management. Our team protects petabytes of data in unique environments, has experience restoring thousands of files and servers, and has brought companies back from the brink of disaster when it seemed impossible.

Backup Your Desired Normal

Backups are more than just peace-of-mind; they are your path back to “normal” after a data disaster. Make sure what you are backing up is the version of normal you would want to restore. Chances are if you aren’t very comfortable with your protection today, it’s time to really understand your risks and consider bringing in a partner.

Contact us to learn what a custom-tailored solution looks like for your business.