round up | month in view wins > BridgeHead London Clinic contract

BridgeHead Software has won

a contract to provide data back up and protection solutions to support The London Clinic, the UK-based independently owned non-profit hospital, transition to a brand new, interoperable IT infrastructure. This is the first step to The London Clinic’s new IT infrastructure and aims to improve data availability and speed up disaster recovery times The London Clinic has invested in BridgeHead MediStore, and BridgeHead Integrated Disaster Recovery (BridgeHead IDR), to support its existing investment in BridgeHead Integrated Serverless Backup (ISB). BH MediStore provides a central archive that will free up storage resources and improve the availability of patient data, while BridgeHead ISB/IDR will drastically shorten backup windows, risk and improve recovery times. Mike Roberts, IT director at The London Clinic said: BridgeHead

advises CIOs > Gartner to keep an eye on risk and cost when cloud sourcing

The $820 billion IT services market is changing quickly and dramatically, as cloud computing and offshoring become mainstream, and CIOs should take steps to manage inherent risks and unexpected costs during the cloud services revolution, according to Gartner. During the next few years, market dynamics will determine whether cloudenabled outsourcing will be the demise of traditional outsourcing, if it will lead to the convergence of services and products currently marketed "as a service," or if it will result in next-generation outsourcing. "Cloud service sourcing is immature and fraught with potential hazards. The

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COMPUTER NEWS MIDDLE EAST

Software’s suite of products provides a comprehensive platform for clinical and administrative data and storage management. They already underpin our HIS in relation to backup and DR – but their offering is so much more. The London Clinic plans to use BH MediStore to archive, then manage and protect, up to 15TB of scanned data from its earlier version of the Meditech HIS. This historical data will be stored on more cost effective media than the expensive SAN device where it currently resides, hence freeing up resources for the hosting of current patient information and reducing the primary backup stream. As data is written into the BH MediStore archive, it is indexed, making it easier for The London Clinic to ensure clinical staff can search for and access patient records when and where they are needed. Files can also be de-duped and compressed. Furthermore, as the data is written into the archive, multiple copies of the data are automatically generated that can be geo-dispersed, thereby enhancing The London Clinic’s overall protection and further enabling its disaster recovery strategy.

Tony Tomkys, director of sales, EMEA, BridgeHead Software, said: “What The London Clinic is doing with data is what BridgeHead suggests all hospitals do: remove static data from the primary backup stream and put it into a safer, more cost-effective storage environment where it can be accessed by clinicians and hospital staff when and where needed, BridgeHead plays its role by ensuring patient records across all systems are quickly and easily accessible, and that point-in-time replicas of patient data are intelligently distributed, to the appropriate secondary storage (e.g. tape, disk, Cloud, even VTL), as well as geodispersed for disaster recovery.”

hype around cloud computing services has increased interest, as well as caution, for CIOs trying to determine where, when and if cloud services can provide valuable outcomes for their businesses," said Frank Ridder, VP at Gartner. "Cloud computing is driving discontinuity that introduces exciting opportunities and costly challenges. Organisations need to understand these changes and develop realistic cloud sourcing strategies and contracts that can reduce risk." According to Ridder, in the new cloud scenario, organisations will find design principles based on flexibility and innovation in place of traditional rigidity and change resistant processes of years past. In his opinion, ensuring the organisation understands both the short and long term implications of cloud services on the demand as well as the supply side as well

as on the sourcing life cycle itself, will help them avoid potential pitfalls and hidden costs of cloud services. l pitfalls and hidden costs of cloud sourcing. "The life cycle is a critical area to plan and manage, regardless of whether organisations source their IT services through internal or external resources. Our forecasts indicate that organisations spend 53%of their IT services budget on external services, and that spending is growing 3.9%per year, while new categories of services are experiencing double-digit growth," he said. "Organisations can use Gartner's extensive analysis of changes in delivery, pricing, investment and cost to more effectively develop their cloud sourcing strategies, negotiate their cloud services contracts and manage the performance of their providers", concluded Ridder.

may 2011

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