Ciox Health protects access to 100,000+ medical records per minute across multiple clouds with Veeam

In the healthcare sector, knowledge truly is power. The quality of care that clinicians can provide often depends on how quickly they can access relevant patient data, such as medical histories, test results and scans.

“When an ambulance pulls up to a hospital with a patient in need of life-saving care, clinicians must get their hands on that person’s medical record straight away,” said Robbie Hudec. “For every second that’s lost, the outcome hangs in the balance. Ciox wants to tackle that challenge head-on: we aim to get medical data to our customers rapidly and securely, so that they’re empowered to provide the best care.”

Today, Ciox supports thousands of providers, payers, health data analytics companies, patient-facing applications, government agencies, research institutions and life sciences companies with essential insights. The company serves up hundreds of thousands of medical records daily, each of which can be hundreds of pages long.

“Our business is incredibly data-intensive,” said Hudec. “For example, one of our most critical databases logs 40,000 transactions per minute. Managing data at scale is a challenge, but we must do it well — people’s lives depend on it. So, we looked for a robust data protection solution that would allow us to recover fast in the event of disasters such as cyberattacks or hardware failures.”

To align with its leading-edge technology strategy, Ciox targeted a data protection solution that offered exceptional flexibility and versatility.

“We are trailblazers, not followers,” said Hudec. “We don’t shy away from new technologies. As a result, we wanted a solution that wouldn’t lock us in or out of a particular vendor or roadmap — allowing us to maintain our agility.”

To ensure digital healthcare data is always readily available for its customers, Ciox chose Veeam Data Platform – Advanced Edition, Veeam Backup for AWS and Microsoft Azure. The company was attracted by the openness and interoperability of Veeam technology.

“Veeam doesn’t care where your data resides or what hardware you use; it provides outstanding protection regardless,” said Hudec. “We knew that Veeam was the ideal choice for our diverse technology landscape, and that it would support us however we chose to evolve in the future. It ticks the boxes for flexibility and affordability.”

Ciox uses Veeam to protect 14,000 workloads running on AWS and Microsoft Azure, plus colocation data centers. Each day, the company creates immutable backups of more than 500TB of data and sends them from one cloud to another.

“Currently, we host most of our critical applications in Azure, our data deidentification applications for life sciences in AWS, and our back-office applications at our colo sites,” said Hudec. “Using Veeam, we back up our Azure and colo environments to AWS, and our AWS data to Azure. The great thing about Veeam is that we can switch this at any time, and we can recover in either cloud. It’s designed to integrate seamlessly with multi-cloud environments like ours.”

Ciox is gradually moving more workloads into the cloud, decommissioning on-premises data centers as it goes. Veeam has proved a crucial tool in this process, saving the company valuable resources.

“One of my team members had the idea to use Veeam when we shut down one of our data centers,” said Hudec. “To spin up quickly in the cloud, we pulled up a backup in Veeam and restored it in the target environment. That meant we saved on the time and cost of procuring a third-party tool or professional services, and it worked perfectly. Veeam is now our data migration tool of choice.”

Thanks to Veeam, Ciox is now utilizing its backup data in new ways. As the company explores the use of exciting new technologies, Veeam provides an additional layer of protection.

“Veeam supports dynamic decision-making about where to take our technology strategy next, which suits us down to the ground,” said Hudec. “We will begin using Veeam in Azure West later this year. Veeam allows us to shift test environments from one cloud environment to another. We’re now increasing our use of Kubernetes, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Azure Blob. Veeam also enables us to add capacity on demand by restoring workloads quickly for systems that don’t lend themselves to autoscaling technologies. With Data Freedom enabled by Veeam, we can reimagine our landscape as much as want, helping us continue to be the driving force behind high-quality, low-cost healthcare.”

• Enables non-stop availability of more than 100,000 medical records per minute across multiple clouds, supporting excellent patient outcomes. 
  Veeam helps us ensure that our customers can access hundreds of thousands of medical records, across multiple clouds, reliably and securely, 24/7,” said Hudec. “Digitizing healthcare data will change the world and save a lot of lives — backed by Veeam, we’re spearheading this revolution.”

• Creates immutable backups of 500TB of data daily with a spend of less than USD 20,000 per month, maximizing business value. 
  When you consider the scale of our data and the fact that we are backing up one cloud to another, our costs are remarkably low,” said Hudec. “Thanks to the immutability feature offered by Veeam, we’re confident that we can keep our data safe from internal and external threats.”

• Cuts the cost of Ciox’s data center consolidation and enables ongoing agility by moving data seamlessly between multiple clouds. 
  Veeam is Ciox’s data migration tool of choice, offering significant time and cost savings over alternatives. The company also reduces risk with a cloud- and platform-agnostic data solution.