Disaster recovery done right: Building a healthcare system that can’t go dark
Circumventing disaster long before it strikes
Deaconess Health System is the premier provider of health care services across 51 counties in southern Indiana, southeastern Illinois, and western Kentucky, made up of 20 wholly owned, joint-ventured, sponsored, or affiliated hospitals. Deaconess has been a Vervint client for more than a decade, since Vervint helped with its initial Epic implementation in 2009.
Deaconess realized that having both of its data centers in the same geographic area left its entire system vulnerable to a single disaster, so Vervint helped build a cloud-based disaster recovery solution in Azure that could bring not just Epic, but their whole application ecosystem, back online with minimal disruption.
Get out of a single point of failure
Move disaster recovery out of a second data center in the same geographic footprint and into the cloud.
Protect what actually matters most
Prioritize Epic and the roughly 25 other applications truly critical to patient care, out of about 100 in total use.
Be ready to recover fast, with minimal IT lift
Build a managed disaster recovery service that could bring systems back online with minimal involvement from Deaconess’ own IT staff.
One disaster away from losing both centers
Every healthcare system prepares for disasters that could disrupt patient care, but Deaconess had more reason than most to be concerned: its two data centers sat in the same geographic envelope, creating the potential for both to go offline in a single event. With 20 facilities in its own system, plus other healthcare organizations connected through Community Connect relying on that infrastructure, an outage could impact thousands of patients in need of care. Vervint began with an assessment to understand current capacity needs and identify which of the roughly 100 applications running on Deaconess’ data centers were truly critical, Epic plus about 25 others.
Building a cloud-first safety net
Deaconess wanted disaster recovery that covered its entire ecosystem, not just Epic, so Vervint recommended moving the whole DR environment to Azure, starting with a tertiary copy of the environment and gradually reducing investment in the existing DR data center infrastructure toward a goal of a single physical data center backed by cloud-based disaster recovery. For a handful of critical applications that couldn’t run in Azure at launch due to size or platform restrictions, Vervint architected a hybrid model using a cloud-adjacent colo space, then built the Deaconess Cloud Foundation and implemented a DR replica of Deaconess’ production Epic database.
Deaconess also engaged Vervint for ongoing managed services, so that when disaster does strike, Vervint can bring systems back online with minimal involvement needed from Deaconess’ own IT staff.
With a cloud-based safety net now in place, Deaconess is positioned to keep serving patients across three states without missing a beat, disaster or not.
