Bristow Medical Center & CORE on automating BCDR, Security, IT Documentation and Compliance
With Unitrends in place, I was able to recover from an incident in 20 minutes. We lost zero data. We didn’t have to pay a ransom. Jason Poulin
Executive IT Director
Unitrends Solution for Bristow Medical Center & CORE
- 10 TB of data
- Physical Windows Servers
- Hyper-V Virtual Servers
- EMR Systems
- Microsoft 365
- Full protection for heterogenous environments
- Ransomware recovery
- Integrated cloud storage for compliance and long-term retention
- Autonomous remediation of environmental issues
- Single pane of glass for physical, virtual, application and SaaS backups
The Challenge
When Jason first came on board at BEHC, the Center worked primarily with an MSP who provided a backup service through the use of file-level directory backups. As he became acclimated with the organization and their technology strategy, Jason determined that a disaster recovery solution he could have confidence in was paramount. “One of things I acknowledged and wanted, coming in, was a true backup solution. In the event of severe weather, we live in Tornado Alley — I didn’t feel comfortable or confident enough in the backups that were going on at the time.”
Familiar with Unitrends from a prior role, Jason believed Unitrends’ solution was the right fit to meet the needs of BEHC clinics, staff and patients. BEHC deployed Unitrends Backup appliances to protect approximately 10TB of data across physical servers, virtual machines and their electronic medical record (EMR) systems. The Center replicates some key machines and data to the Unitrends Cloud for compliance, long-term data retention and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
Access to critical systems and patient data in the event of an outage is critical. “I wanted to have some reassurances here. I set a goal, a 4–6 hour goal at that time. Now [more recently], I’ve been leaning towards a two-hour recovery and [should a disaster occur] can we push for that two-hour recovery? [With the] right engineers at Unitrends and Kaseya we can do that. I feel confident in the data, in the image-level backups and the [Unitrends Disaster Recovery as a Service] DRaaS.”
Jason’s confidence in Unitrends was instilled early on. In his previous role as IT Director at a different rural organization, their facility fell victim to a ransomware attack. The attack penetrated the network via a desktop computer and targeted their EMR system by attacking drives mapped to the application’s host server.
Follow Up
Unitrends has been on hand to help with the recovery of files and servers whenever as the occasional issue arises. “I’ve recovered entire machines based on an image. A hardware crash, whether just a small desktop unit or an entire server. We did a recovery here on a hardware device that was in place for 7-8 years and we were able to recover that image onto a new piece of hardware with no issue.”
The BEHC team keeps up with Unitrends engineers and educational materials to ensure they’re on the cutting edge of releases, new technology and new ways of doing things. As an IT professional operating multiple sites in a rural healthcare setting, Jason knows all too well that teams often run leaner staffs and are tasked with a wide range of responsibilities from supporting remote users and operating and securing a data center environment, to maintaining compliance under regulations such as HIPAA and the CARES Act.
After learning more about IT Complete, Kaseya’s architecture of integrated solutions that enables IT to manage more complex IT service deliveries efficiently, Jason saw an opportunity to take advantage of the flexibility, versatility and unification of the platform.
“We [used to] have multiple portals do multiple things. With the work you all have done to go through one single pane of glass — I like that. I want a single portal where I can go in, see my device, remote in, look at backups, see tickets that were created based on a piece of hardware or particular end user. For me, it’s that one portal to log into to get a great picture of my environment as a whole.”
In particular, time spent troubleshooting environmental issues that were the source of backup failures was consuming many valuable man hours. To help solve this issue, the BEHC team leveraged Unitrends Helix, a SaaS solution born from IT Complete integrations, designed for autonomous remediation of infrastructure errors that impact backups (such as VSS writers).
“We had a period of time where we had failed backups and we’d have to go in and manually clear that VSS writer, restart that writer or server, and then kick off the backups [and we’d] usually have to wait until after hours.”
In Helix, Jason saw an opportunity to save an already lean staff even more time in management and maintenance of their backup solution. After implementing Helix, the team saw immediate results. Errors in their environment were remediated and dependencies between devices were corrected, ensuring a consistent state of operations and reliable, good backups.
“You [Unitrends] delivered a software agent [Helix] that looked at VSS issues in my Hyper-V environment, corrected them, and sent me an email. That in and of itself put so much value on backups. The level of engagement and the man hours saved — the Helix agent was fantastic. I can’t wait to see what R&D comes up with next. Kudos to those folks!”
