Today, healthcare organizations are facing a tsunami of data coming at them from all directions while their storage approaches are still designed for yesterday's silo'd world. The combination of medical images, EMR data and other business-related content easily consume today's disk drives. But those same drives will be overcome by the pending wave of new formats on the horizon including genomes and digital pathology data coming as a second surge. The net result is that the data explosion adds hidden costs to our healthcare system. Here's the view I see when I travel around and visit with IT executives:
Many hospital execs seem unaware that their data growth has a mind boggling 40% CAGR. They know that their storage is growing, but they haven't gotten their minds around the explosiveness of the growth and the implications for their operations, data centers, and total cost of ownership. Very few CIO/CTOs I speak with actually know their costs to manage storage yet it's probably 10-15% of their IT budget, and growing.
Many health systems also don't realize that most of their data is actually archival. The reality is that over 90% of data created is never accessed. And, 95% of the data that is accessed is 24 months old or newer. The retrieval activity level falls off a cliff after about 18 months, yet the data is being stored in expensive tier one category storage systems which can be 5x 10x the cost of an archive.
This begs the obvious question of why so few hospital systems recognize this situation and why so few have a formal archiving plan. I see three reasons. First, part of this stems from the prevailing attitude that everything needs to be instantly available, even your son's X-Ray of his broken toe taken in 1990. Secondly, departments have historically managed their clinical applications outside the IT purview, so storage has become overly application-specific and undermanaged. Thirdly, entrenched status quo thinking has prevented adjustment to the new storage reality.
It's obvious that hospitals cannot keep every byte of data online, onsite, and forever. It's simply impractical, unaffordable, and unnecessary. Hospitals need to snap a line and declare certain data as archival, and to develop an archive strategy based on appropriate policies.
We think the solution is straightforward. Hospitals should create an enterprise archive repository supporting multiple applications and move away from today's silo'd approach. We see significant storage inefficiencies with today's silos, where storage systems are only 50% utilized but cannot be leveraged across an organization. Our recommendations are as follows:
Analyze your data to determine the true amount (typically less than 10%) that needs to be retrieved; this data is likely less than two years old.
Plan to allocate Tier 1 storage systems for this active data.
Establish an archive for the balance of the data (typically 90%) that doesn't need millisecond -rate access.
Develop a policy for when and where data is moved.
By determining the cost-to-access trade-off that makes sense for your organization, and using the right blend of online, near-line and offline archival technologies, you can significantly drive down costs. Interestingly, when your analysis is complete, you'll find that a very high percentage of data can be stored off-line, on tape, or in another technology for which you can tolerate retrievals in minutes (vs. seconds). You'll save 50% or more on your storage expenses.
As a managed archive service provider, we often get calls from customers who are rapidly running out of storage and fed-up with buying expensive solutions not to mention paying for the constant costs of refreshes, migrations, data center space, and more. But because they wait until the last minute and don't fully understand their current cost structure, they often default to buying additional storage, deferring the decision till they once again run out of disk space. A little planning here can pay off in big savings.
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Today, healthcare organizations are facing a tsunami of data coming at them from all directions while their storage approaches are still designed for yesterday's silo'd world. The combination of medical images, EMR data and other business-related content easily consume today's disk drives. But those same drives will be overcome by the pending wave of new formats on the horizon including genomes and digital pathology data coming as a second surge. The net result is that the data explosion adds hidden costs to our healthcare system. Here's the view I see when I travel around and visit with IT executives:
