Discussions about moving to the "cloud" have surfaced in nearly every industry and a number of organizations are still struggling to determine whether or not they can benefit from such a move.

 

Florida-based Automated Document Solutions (ADS) is one organization that made the move to a virtual private data center and is now reaping the benefits. 

A business opportunity was presented to ADS when a large hospital group needed 24x7 access to 7 terabytes (TB) worth of medical records. ADS did not have the robust infrastructure this opportunity required. And building a hardened in-house data center with a Storage Area Network (SAN) required too much lead time and cost to be realistic. 

ADS found a better solution by moving to Host.net's (News - Alert) Virtual Private Data Center (vPDC) service. Such a move eliminated capital outlays, enabled near-immediate rollout and helped ADS win the contract by offering the security of Host.net's SAS (News - Alert) 70 Type II certified facilities to a client demanding data privacy and availability.

The virtual private data center also provided virtualization benefits that ranged from faster disaster recovery to consolidated storage and centralized application updates for all ADS client locations. As a result, ADS is now using the virtual private data center from Host.net for all new clients. 

ADS focuses on providing document imaging and management services for the healthcare industry. When the company was presented with the opportunity to provide backfile scanning, storage and data access for the hospital group with 7 TB of records, IT managers quickly realized they needed a SAN to handle the load and that plan just wasn't feasible.

"Beyond purchasing the SAN hardware, database and application servers and switching equipment and other hardware to outfit a data center, we would have needed backup, redundancy, full-time staff, and a lot more. That doesn't include soft costs such as annual support fees," said Michael S. Crews, director of information technology for ADS. "The costs were staggering, and we had only weeks - not months - to deploy."

Host.net already had the virtual private data center platform in place, which allowed ADS to have the new client provisioned within days. Newly digitized documents are transmitted to Host.net through a secure VPN tunnel and housed in ADS' private cloud for reliable retrieval as needed by medical professionals.

The virtual private data center has an application layer in place to manage the electronic records and secure user access to them. The platform runs the ADS management system to track transaction activity at all of the firm's client sites. 

"If I had to support everything that Host.net is doing for me, I would need two additional full-time staffers for our 7 TB client alone," Crews said. "Bringing our own data center up to SAS 70 Type II standards would also be cost-prohibitive."

ADS also reaps the benefits of Host.net's virtualized architecture as it has the ability to provision additional SAN space on demand. The same scalability can also easily apply to server memory in Host.net's virtualized environment. When Crew needed to double his RAM (News - Alert) on the virtual machine, the request was fulfilled in a number of hours with no downtime or server reboot.

As a result of partnering with Host.net and taking advantage of its virtual private data center platform, ADS has been able to simplify client management while also reducing the physical server needs.