A disaster recovery plan for branch offices: Five layers of redundancy
For some organizations, it takes an act of God to get serious about a disaster recovery plan for remote offices and branch offices. For Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), the organization’s mission to treat patients like family members was more than enough motivation to make sure IT did it right, said CIO Chad Eckes.
The proximate cause was a move from paper to electronic health records.
CTCA needed to have centralized data centers because its widely dispersed hospitals share electronic health records. That requirement affected all three risks that must be managed for in a disaster recovery plan — power, applications and data, and the network.
CTCA has built in four layers of redundancy for its systems data, and has a fifth layer of redundancy in the event of a worst-case scenario — an approach Eckes touts as uncommon, if not unique, among health care organizations.
See: A disaster recovery plan for branch offices: Five layers of redundancy by Linda Tucci, from CIO News.
