Today, US Signal announced that it has implemented a managed Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service solution for Baystate Health Service (BHS), a non-profit healthcare system, which serves more than 1 million people. 

US Signal's DRaaS solution is powered by the Zerto IT Resilience Platform and provides BHS with reserve compute on demand, near synchronous replication and instant managed recovery to protect and quickly recover critical patient data.

"We re-evaluated our approach to disaster recovery and data availability based on advice given by our trusted IT consulting partner, VertitechIT. They introduced us to US Signal and got us thinking about DRaaS for the first time," commented David Miller, senior IT director and CTO, Baystate Health.

Specifically, the DRaaS solution spans BHS' local site and US Signal's Grand Rapids, Michigan data center, delivering second-by-second geo-diverse data replication for each of BHS' virtual machines without the CAPEX investment associated with creating a bespoke remote DR center.

"US Signal's Zerto-powered DRaaS package delivers an economical solution that replicates and protects our data, while also keeping our applications running, even when they need more compute than our on-premises resources can support," explained Miller.

US Signal's DRaaS solution provides protection for critical BHS applications including PeopleSoft, PACS, OnBase, Vocera, MetaVision, MedStation and Kronos and dramatically exceeds Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance. In fact, during testing, US Signal was able to bring BHS systems back online within minutes, far exceeding the two hours required for HIPAA compliance. 

"With the risks of unplanned IT outages from natural disasters, cyberattacks and human error always on the rise, having effective disaster recovery plans and technology in place is more important than ever-especially in the healthcare space where sensitive data is everywhere and lives are on the line," said US Signal's Director of Cloud Sales Development Jerry Clark.

Furthermore, US Signal's DRaaS solution includes monthly IT system health checks to keep on top of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) SLAs. It also features two documented DR tests each year and a fully managed DR playbook. This delivers an additional layer of trust and protection, giving BHS the peace of mind to focus on its core patient care business instead of worrying about business continuity or disaster recovery.

"Our DRaaS solution provides organizations like BHS with near continuous block-level replication of critical workloads, and virtual machines are protected from their production data center to a US Signal cloud data center, so they are always covered and always on. We are proud to be BHS' partner in achieving IT resilience," elaborated Clark.

The DRaaS approach enabled BHS to find a high availability and data protection solution in line with its budget. With US Signal, customers are not paying for hardware. They are paying a management fee for storage and DR services, making it extremely affordable. In BHS' case, the company got the speedy recovery and geo-diversity it needed from a second DR site, without having to make additional server purchases.