Panzura and Datatility have announced a partnership to help hospitals and healthcare systems improve clinical outcomes and quickly recover from ransomware attacks. The companies will offer the Panzura Global File System-as-a-Service (GFSaaS), optimized by Datatility as a fully managed and always-on service for the healthcare sector, to institutions looking to access, protect and manage their unstructured and untapped clinical data.

GFSaaS is an automated instance of Panzura's flagship unstructured data management solution. It consolidates dark and unstructured data, turning legacy storage into a high-performance global file system that works across any combination of public or private clouds. The data storage requirements of healthcare are a hallmark practice area for Datatility.

Protecting data from ransomware
"Panzura's ability to protect data in the cloud, and recover everything in minutes rather than hours or days, gives healthcare providers peace-of-mind that they would not normally have with legacy storage systems. It has already saved at least one of our hospital clients when they fell victim to cyberattack," said Jan Rosenberg, vice president of business development and co-founder at Datatility. The security of the joint Panzura-Datatility solution prevented the attack from impacting any of the data stored within the file system. 

COVID-19 and remote work have opened a pathway for both state-sponsored actors and rogue cybercriminals. Confirmed data breaches in the healthcare sector increased by 58 percent last year.

The Panzura service holds data within an immutable architecture that offers advantages over legacy storage and alternative file systems. Changes are synced to the cloud as new data objects, rendering files impervious to overwriting by ransomware and other malware variants, and ensuring medical centers and healthcare institutions never pay ransoms.

Driving clinical outcomes with unstructured data
Healthcare data is typically siloed in disparate public, private and dark clouds. This includes a multitude of unstructured electronic health records (EHR) such as imaging files from devices, biosignal data from operating rooms and intensive care units, and pathophysiological audio files from patients and medical staff. Nearly 80 percent of EHR are unstructured. 

The increasing costs of storage for big data in healthcare are compounded by the exponential rate of data growth in these settings. A shift to value-based care and expanding reporting requirements have also complicated the data-driven burden on caregivers.

Panzura's intelligent edge caching and locking technology accelerates I/O while deduping and compressing data. This improves availability and durability, and reduces the amount of storage needed to maintain both backups and primary data files. The service makes it possible to optimize applications, and collaborate among cross-functional and distributed teams, so fast it seems like everyone is in the same room.

"Our partnership with Panzura will help organizations access vastly underutilized clinical information residing in dark and unstructured formats to better coordinate, manage and improve patient care," said Rosenberg.

Datatility will also provision the service to make data more available for analysis. It will be used to archive and store sensitive files at speed and scale, as well as to apply cloud-based machine-learning and AI analytics across a range of document types while remaining in compliance with HIPAA and other mandates on handling and maintenance of electronic healthcare records. 

"Deriving insights from clinical data to improve medical outcomes and enable more efficient delivery relies on making files accessible and secure," said Glen Shok, vice president of strategic alliances at Panzura. "GFSaaS makes it easy to move, manage and protect big data across distant locations, and provides a very different path for disaster recovery so medical facilities and hospitals can become truly data-driven while also meeting strict service-level RTOs and RPOs."

Datatility will deploy GFSaaS in privately owned and operated IBM Cloud Object Storage (ICOS). It is augmented by Panzura Data Services for analytics, monitoring, auditing, billing and management of data within the file system.