Iron Mountain today announced a secure cloud-based archive service for medical data based on NetApp's grid-architecture, object-based, storage software.
Iron Mountain is now the only healthcare-focused member of the NetApp Service Provider Partner Program, which was officially launched last year. It will integrate NetApp's StorageGRID object-based storage software with two Iron Mountain medical data archiving services: the Digital Record Center for Medical Images and its vendor neutral archive offering.
The two services will provide healthcare providers with consolidated archiving and disaster recovery services.
Iron Mountain would not release pricing for the service, which is available today.
"Iron Mountain's medical image archiving offerings deliver the best of all worlds: unlimited capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis with improved off-site disaster recovery that is more cost effective and less complicated than doing it yourself," Ken Rubin, senior vice president and general manager for Iron Mountain's Healthcare Division, said in a statement.
StorageGRID is an object-based storage engine that stores metadata (or information about data) along with files and documents for easier search and retrieval. The software runs on a global policy engine with built-in security that manages how data is stored, placed, protected and retrieved.
Iron Mountain said that a cloud-based archive allows organizations to meet current HIPAA compliance standards that require a disaster recovery plan and policies for protecting that data. A storage-as-a-service offering also reduces IT management complexity in that IT departments no longer have to manage multiple storage systems or deal with interoperability challenges.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com .
Read more about cloud computing in Computerworld's Cloud Computing Topic Center.