Modern Backup, Minimal Cost: Cloud-Based Healthcare Data Protection for Vision Clinic

Vision Clinic is an innovative eye clinic and state-of-the-art eye hospital, committed to leveraging modern technologies and advanced procedures in patient care. They have approached Several Clouds seeking a cloud-based data backup solution. Their primary requirements included robust security to ensure compliance with healthcare data regulations, cost-effectiveness, and scalability to support future growth. 

The Opportunity

Vision Clinic relies on several on-premises backup solutions to manage its data protection needs. However, all backups remain stored locally, exposing them to hardware failure, physical damage, and limited scalability risks. With growing volumes of patient data and the need to retain medical records for extended periods under local and international healthcare regulations, the clinic needs a secure and resilient solution. Their main requirement is to find a centralized, cloud-based backup system that could securely store disk-level server backups and archived patient data, while ensuring compliance, data integrity, and long-term accessibility.

Our Approach

After conducting an initial assessment of the existing backup setups and requirements, and rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach, Several Clouds proposed a set of complementary solutions - each targeting a specific backup need. Given the sensitivity of the clinic’s data, which includes Protected Health Information (PHI), the solution is designed with strict adherence to HIPAA compliance standards and industry best practices for security.

Patient's data backup and recovery

Vision Clinic generates a significant volume of patient records daily, such as high-resolution images, examination data, PDF reports, and various other file types essential to ongoing patient care and diagnostics. Over time, this has led to the aggregation of a large amount of medical data. To ensure compliance with healthcare regulations that mandate the long-term retention of medical records, the clinic requires a secure, reliable, and automated method for archiving both existing and new patient data in the cloud. To address this need, Several Clouds implemented a solution based on AWS DataSync. Using AWS services achieves a fully managed data transfer solution that enables efficient and secure backup of data between on-premises storage and AWS. 

Vision Clinic utilizes commercial backup and disaster recovery software designed to protect critical data by backing up entire server disks, partitions, files, databases, and operating systems. This solution supports multiple backup destinations, including native integration with AWS S3. To take advantage of this feature, Several Clouds provisions a dedicated S3 bucket and the relevant configuration of the software to backup to AWS. To optimize cost-efficiency, the files are stored using AWS S3’s Glacier Flexible Retrieval storage class. Using this storage tier ensures long-term durability and compliance while minimizing ongoing storage expenses and the speed of archive retrieval. This enables the fast disk backup restoration in case of a disaster recovery event.

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Results and Benefits

With the implementation of these two solutions, Vision Clinic gained a secure off-site backup storage environment that is both resilient and cost-effective, offering predictable long-term storage expenses. This AWS backup and disaster recovery solution is designed to follow strict security and compliance standards required for handling sensitive medical data. By following the design best practices, Several Clouds achieves a monthly cost of just $5 per 1TB for managing storage data and the respective data transfer fees.

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‍About the Partner

At Several Clouds, the team is passionate about the public cloud and the DevOps culture and practices. The company assists in modernizing legacy systems and does cloud migrations to achieve more secure, adaptive, and cost-effective environments.

Several Clouds’ AWS architects all possess deep knowledge and extensive experience throughout the full cycle of building business cases, planning, architecting, implementation, and building playbooks and runbooks to help customers with:

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• Cloud adoption and migrations
• Cloud training and talent transformation
• Building secure and compliant cloud environments
• Implementing DevOps and DevSecOps practices
• Cost Optimization and FinOps
• Generative AI, Machine Learning, and Big Data
• Serverless and Cloud-Native Development

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