CHUIMI protects AI-powered healthcare innovation with Veeam

As a public health center, CHUIMI must ensure an excellent standard of care while keeping cost and complexity under control. As a pioneering organization, it harnesses innovation to meet these challenges, saving more lives with leading-edge digital solutions.

“We are constantly rolling out new innovations to support hospital staff,” said Alberto Gonzalez Falcón, Head of IT Systems at the Hospital Complex. “Some highlights include automating medicine dispensing across practically all hospital floors, as well as consolidation and traceability of blood transfusions via barcodes and wireless tablets, which assures patient compatibility. We want to provide doctors and nurses with technology so they can work more efficiently, which helps them care for more patients with greater quality and efficiency.”

With these technological innovations come new pressures. Ensuring that rising volumes of data are available around-the-clock is a top priority for the organization’s IT team since any service interruptions could have terrible consequences.

“To enable fast, agile development, we’ve adopted a containerization strategy,” said Pablo Sanchez Santandreu, Head of IT Service at CHUIMI. “We develop all new apps with technology based on containers and migrate existing apps to the new platform. We cannot ignore the rising threat of cyberattack, which is becoming increasingly common in Spain’s healthcare sector. So, our challenge was to manage the transition to containers while remaining prepared for any contingency.”

CHUIMI selected Veeam to keep essential data at the fingertips of medical and administrative staff 24/7, even as it rolls out leading-edge healthcare applications. In Veeam, the organization found solutions to protect all data during its migration to Kubernetes and beyond.

“The combination of Veeam Data Platform and Kasten K10 gives us truly end-to-end data protection,” said Gonzalez Falcón. “In our review of the market, nothing came close to Veeam. It is simply the best in terms of functionality and ease of use.”

Today, CHUIMI relies on Veeam to keep IT services for more than 5,500 users running without a hitch. The organization backs up data incrementally every ten minutes to minimize the impact of a disaster on operations.

“As a public hospital, we’re protected by the Government of the Canary Islands’ security measures,” said Sanchez Santandreu. “However, we’re adding extra layers of protection and improving our ability to recover quickly from disaster with Veeam. We’re setting up immutable backups, which we will store off-site. Our efforts have even been recognized with a nomination for a cybersecurity award by the Professional Association of New Technologies.”

Thanks to Veeam, the CHUIMI IT team no longer schedules planned maintenance windows to complete backups or put systems into production. The change is helping the organization deliver uninterrupted IT services to users across the hospital, from clinicians to administrative staff.

“We recently carried out a significant upgrade to a critical hospital application,” said Pablo Sanchez Santandreu. “In the past, we’d have had to shut down the service so we could back up the app before starting the upgrade — a process that could take up to an hour and a half. With Veeam, the backup was done in minutes, so we could proceed with very little risk and no impact on users.”

CHUIMI is using Kasten K10 both to protect containerized workloads and to support innovation. The IT team takes advantage of built-in application mobility capabilities to drive continual evolution of its IT environment while reducing the risk of changes causing issues.

“Today, 95% of our in-house developed apps run in Kubernetes containers, and Veeam has played a big role in that transition,” said Sanchez Santandreu. “Soon, we will migrate our entire Kubernetes cluster to new servers, and we expect Kasten K10 to make this a straightforward process. It allows us to roll back changes at the click of the button so we can bring exciting new services to users more efficiently.” - Pablo Sanchez Santandreu, Head of IT Service, CHUIMI.

• Drives down risk of data loss to near zero thanks to incremental backups every ten minutes 
  Veeam helps CHUIMI deliver unprecedented IT service continuity to users, supporting exceptional levels of healthcare delivery.
• Eliminates planned maintenance windows to keep healthcare applications running at full performance 24/7 
  With no need for service outages to carry out essential upgrades thanks to Veeam, CHUIMI can keep its healthcare apps running smoothly around the clock.
• Supports low-risk, rapid development of new healthcare applications with near-instant rollback to previous environments 
  “We’re starting to introduce AI-enabled services in areas such as ophthalmology and as early-warning systems for pandemics,” said Sanchez Santandreu. “With Kasten K10, we roll out new features and functionality with minimal risk, because we can restore previous environments with just a few clicks. It allows us to innovate without fear.”