Driven by the expansion of electronic records and regulatory pressures including Meaningful Use, ICD-10 and Accountable Care, the volume of data produced by the health care industry continues to grow, and health care organizations need cost-effective ways to manage that data. Iron Mountain® Incorporated has announced it has signed a multi-year data center colocation agreement with Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, an acute care teaching hospital affiliated with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Englewood, New Jersey. Englewood Hospital will lease data center space within Iron Mountain’s underground data center located near Pittsburgh.

With the addition of Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology, a new picture archiving and communication system (PACS), and a Vendor Neutral Archive, Englewood Hospital’s IT leadership recognized that the exploding data growth and resulting power density requirements created capacity challenges in the hospital’s existing internal data center. Furthermore, the hospital wanted to ensure that they were prepared and could recover quickly if struck by a disaster. In order to address capacity constraints and faster Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), the hospital’s IT leadership decided to partner with Iron Mountain for a second data center location. 

Englewood Hospital was already familiar with Iron Mountain as an existing customer of data management services, including cloud-based storage and offsite tape vaulting, and was confident that the same secure and compliant processes would extend into the data center service offering. Iron Mountain’s underground data center’s superior physical security, reliability and resiliency were also key considerations for Englewood Hospital during the selection process.

“Shortly after our PACS implementation, we realized our onsite data center would soon be over capacity. From a capital expense perspective, colocation was the right approach versus building our own data center. But we could not compromise security or compliance. We sought an offsite data center provider that could meet our stringent compliance and disaster recovery requirements,” said Ronald J. Fuschillo, chief information officer, Englewood Hospital and Medical Center. “For the past three years, we have trusted Iron Mountain with our cloud storage and offsite tape vaulting needs so adding their data centers operations seemed to be a natural fit.”

Englewood Hospital’s IT team has created an additional disaster recovery site by using Iron Mountain’s colocation facility to deploy an Active / Active solution and improve the hospital’s everyday performance while reducing inefficiencies. The solution eliminates bandwidth contention by providing hospital staff access to applications at the hospital’s onsite data center and remote clinics access to the second data center site at the Iron Mountain colocation facility. Additionally, the system allows for failover if one site becomes inoperable due to a disaster. Englewood Hospital is also leveraging Iron Mountain’s Total Network Services for a high-quality, low-cost connectivity solution and improving efficiencies to its data center.

“Our data centers are designed to help organizations in highly regulated environments, like Englewood Hospital, said Mark Kidd, senior vice president and general manager, data centers, Iron Mountain. “From employee training to the infrastructure of our buildings, we take a stringent approach to complying with industry-specific regulations such as HIPAA, PCI, and FISMA. Our operational expertise in managing information assets from creation to destruction also differentiates us for our customers. Iron Mountain has valued its relationship with Englewood through the years supporting their storage and information management needs. We’re thrilled to now extend that relationship to the data center.”