NetApp Partnership Targets Healthcare

Few areas are facing the data challenges at the scale of the healthcare industry, which generates an incredible amount of information each day—but is also forced to store that data for lengthy periods while maintaining the ability to call up any data at a moment’s notice.

With this in mind, the storage industry is always seeking new inroads into healthcare by offering secure archiving, backup and other services. To that end, today NetApp and Iron Mountain announced a partnership to focus on the rising data demands of the healthcare industry via offerings tied to archiving and disaster recovery.

The partnership has produced a security-conscious cloud-based medical archiving and disaster recovery platform. As the star partner on NetApp’s healthcare front, this offering will integrate NetApp’s StorageGRID object storage with Iron Mountain’s existing medical data archiving solutions, including their Digital Record Center for Medical Images.

The companies claim that this partnership will help healthcare institutions control storage growth and cut costs using the pay for use model, ensure compliance and reduce the complexity of managing vast pool of medical data.

Iron Mountain has a number of archiving-based partnerships with vendors such as HP, IBM and Microsoft. While the company places significant emphasis on shoring up customers in the healthcare industry, it is finding ways to seep into other verticals that have out of control data management and archiving demands. With combined tape and cloud-based options, Iron Mountain is also strengthening its business with a number of customer wins in both government and financial services.

For storage vendors like NetApp, which saw an opportunity in healthcare via a partnership with the well-established Iron Mountain, there is no better place to be.  According to NetApp, “The healthcare industry is at a data management crossroads, driven by the exponential growth of patient data, tighter federal and industry regulations, shrinking IT budgets, and the transition to electronic health records.”