Path Forward IT speeds EHR recovery time while lowering TCO, with Cohesity-Powered backup as a service

The Challenge

Every healthcare practice, from allergies to vein care, needs secure backups of electronic health records (EHRs) to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

“Our healthcare partners can’t abide downtime, have tight budgets, and are subject to strict data protection regulations,” says Adam Brock, Senior Director for Data Protection. “Nobody wants to turn away a cancer patient because it’s taking a long time to restore EHR data after a power outage or cyberattack. Besides that, the revenue loss can be devastating.”

Path Forward IT’s Patient Shield service, introduced in 2019, provides HIPAA-compliant backups of physical and virtual servers and Microsoft 365 workloads. In 2021, Brock wanted to take backup as a service (BaaS) to a new level. “When you provide managed BaaS to healthcare providers, the name of the game is fast restores, the flexibility to back up to whatever hardware or cloud the customer is currently using, and security,” he says. “Security always comes up in the first customer conversation. If ransomware makes it past a healthcare practice’s multifactor authentication, patch management, antivirus, and firewalls, secure backups are the last line of defense.”

The Solution

Evaluating Cohesity, Datto, and Veeam, Path Forward IT selected Cohesity DataProtect. “We chose Cohesity to power Patient Shield because it’s security-centric, is quick to deploy, restores data quickly, and meets our healthcare customers’ compliance requirements,” says Matt Haines, Chief Operating Officer. Uniquely, Cohesity also gives Path Forward IT the flexibility to store each healthcare partner’s data wherever it makes most sense—say, 30 days on a local Cohesity or HPE appliance, 90 or 365 days in a colocation facility, and seven years on AWS or Azure for archiving. “That flexibility keeps our customers’ costs down because they can continue using their existing hardware,” Brock says.

In a pilot, the speed of restores wowed the customer—just 10 minutes for 10 TB of EHR data. “Now Cohesity is our first recommendation for any healthcare provider—and also customers in other industries who use our Data Shield service,” says Brock. Path Forward IT is in the process of migrating existing Patient Shield customers to Cohesity, and currently protects two petabytes of data for 50 customers.

The Results

Onboarding new customers to Patient Shield takes a fraction of the time it did with the previous platform, lowering costs and accelerating revenue. “With Cohesity we can deploy a standard backup and recovery solution in just two weeks,” Brock says. Complex deployments with multiple locations are about 35% faster. “Onboarding one of our customers to Datto took 11 months, but that same process and same customer with Cohesity took just four months in 2021,” says Brock.

Healthcare providers appreciate the fast EHR restores, which minimize disruption if data is lost due to SAN failure, cyberattack, power outage, a failed patch, and or any other event. “When a neurology practice’s SAN failed, with Cohesity we were able to restore 40 TB of EMR data with all the applications and services in just a few hours,” Brock says. “I just searched for all files, clicked ‘Restore All’ – and sat down for dinner. With our previous backup solution it would have taken days to rebuild the customer’s storage and decide where to restore each file.”

Path Forward IT’s total cost of ownership dropped by 70% after the switch to Cohesity, the result of 3:1 data deduplication and 13% fewer trouble tickets. Just five engineers easily manage 50 Cohesity clusters, meeting strict SLAs, 24/7. Customer costs also decreased, by an average of 75%. “Combined with our pay-per-use billing, Cohesity’s 3:1 dedupe ratio translates to some serious savings,” Brock notes.

Finally, Cohesity’s multiple security layers— including multifactor authentication, immutable backups, and secure off-site replication— bring peace of mind, both to Path Forward IT and its healthcare partners. “I used to worry that a backup solution that I’d given my stamp of approval to could become an attack vector,” says Brock. “I sleep better knowing that Cohesity’s backups are immutable and even if the backups were somehow breached, the data is securely replicated offsite to a co-lo facility or the cloud.”

Brock says, “Our healthcare partners want to know that their data is recoverable quickly during their worst moments. Cohesity gives us the confidence that all data will be recoverable fast and at scale—and provides the reporting and dev/test tools to validate that every day.”