Lowest cost

The budget of course plays a very significant role in large IT projects. And this goes some way to explaining the cloud’s increasing popularity as it can result in substantial cost-savings largely thanks to its scalability. After comparing other alternatives, such as a private cloud, ZOL opted for this asynchronous disaster recovery in stand-by as the most affordable solution. ‘There are always new applications being added which set ever-increasing requirements for the infrastructure. We work with images which have ever-higher resolutions, for example, so we need more storage capacity and bandwidth,’ explains Thijs. It’s true that this increases the cost for upload bandwidth, but that’s more than offset by Microsoft Azure’s low storage and stand-by costs.

Completely secure data

Of course, everyone’s first concern when it comes to patient records: what about data protection? Can it be easily hacked or stolen? Isn’t the data visible to others if it’s kept on a server which lots of other companies are using too? Kohera deals with this concern by setting the bar very high when it comes to data protection. Kohera first encrypts ZOL’s patient records with SQL Server, and the latest features enable backups to be made with StorSimple, a hybrid cloud storage service that provides an extra layer of encryption. The backup files are then encrypted again and sent to Microsoft Azure. So there’s triple encryption for confidential patient records. And furthermore, the encryption keys are protected by a certificate.