Cloud Hosting Article

Data storage and compliance are critical for most organizations – especially those in the healthcare industry.

After dealing with several data protection and archiving challenges, EnvisionRxOptions, a provider of transparent pharmacy benefits management (PBM) services, has deployed the Riverbed (News - Alert) Whitewater cloud storage gateway appliance to support its four locations in the U.S.

Company officials claim that moving to cloud backup with Whitewater saves EnvisionRxOptions up to 75 percent in storage fees and improves the company’s archiving operations to assist with data storage growth and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance.

In total, EnvisionRxOptions was managing 15 terabytes of data, which was growing between 30 to 50 percent annually and was too expensive to replicate multiple times to its other storage sites.

The Twinsburg, Ohio-based company was able to get the Whitewater cloud storage gateway appliance up and running quickly, according to Nakul Kapadia, director of IT at EnvisionRxOptions.

“We picked Nirvanix (News - Alert) from a drop down menu, entered in our credentials, and were up and running and replicating data to the cloud in about 30 minutes,” Kapadia said in a statement. “We have seen great results and the end-to-end data security in flight and at rest with SSL v3 and 256-bit AES encryption gives us confidence in storing our data in the cloud and also helps satisfy our audit requirements.”

In addition to its Twinsburg location, the company also has offices in North Canton, Ohio, Sacramento, Calif., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Prior to deploying Riverbed’s cloud storage gateway appliance, EnvisionRxOptions was dealing with three different data protection and archiving challenges. The first was that archiving up to 8,000 customer and client calls per day was consuming expensive tier-one storage in multiple sites due to replication and backup policies, creating up to four times the amount of the original data. The company was also archiving large financial spreadsheets created to analyze past claims as part of new business acquisition. Finally, they needed to protect emails stored in its Symantec Enterprise Vault archiving system with Backup Exec.

The Whitewater appliance compresses WAV (News - Alert) files created from the customer phone calls, which results in a 50 percent savings in data set sizes, reduction in cloud storage costs and faster transmission times. EnvisionRxOptions is seeing a deduplication ratio of up to four-to-one for the financial analyst claims spreadsheets, which represents a 75 percent savings in cloud storage fees, according to Kapadia.

“This is very significant because our data growth was far outpacing our ability to scale our storage in our primary and secondary sites and also our ability to scale our backup solutions,” he added.

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