Archiving Whitepapers and Ebooks

HoweveR, in today's dynamic environment of healthcare reform--with its government mandates, funding deadlines and transformational IT initiatives-- those kinds of events can be just as disastrous. High availability, security, business continuity and disaster recovery are more important in healthcare today than ever. New regulations and reforms are dramatically increasing the amount and types of digital data that healthcare organizations of all sizes generate, share and secure. Parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 are jump-starting an IT revolution in healthcare. The rules are incenting physicians and hospitals to digitize health records and are promoting digital exchange of information among doctor's offices, clinics, hospitals, labs and pharmacies--as well as with government agencies. The ability to handle this increase in data--and to keep it constantly available and simultaneously secure--is crucial to improved patient care. But it's also critical to the ongoing viability of healthcare organizations themselves. Any hospital that can't reliably and securely receive, collect and store digital information from other hospitals, healthcare providers and the government and transmit it to them will be at a disadvantage in the market. Under the rules for adoption of electronic health (EHRs), healthcare organizations that fall short after 2015 will be subject to lower-reimbursement penalties.

When virtualization first appeared on the radar screens of IT managers and CIOs in the late 1990s, it was seen as a technology that could help reduce costs. By moving applications and storage from a physical to a virtual environment, companies could reduce server numbers and slash operating expenses. However, while virtualization was successful in helping companies achieve cost reduction, there are growing signs that the technology is helping companies achieve a lot more. In reviews of customer sites, IDC is finding examples of how virtualization is being used to increase agility, simplify IT environments, and help business leaders better manage their technology resources. For many organizations, virtualization has become a critical element that sits at the very heart of their IT infrastructure. As part of its Total Business Transformation (TBT) project, National Foods has implemented a highly consolidated and virtualized server infrastructure using the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) on HP-UX 11i. For National Foods, like many other companies, the initial key driver was cost reduction. However, as the deployment progressed, National Foods' IT managers realized that virtualization could help in many other ways. It allowed them to speed the deployment of new applications, more effectively protect IT from disaster, and generally become more agile and responsive to changing business requirements.

Abstract: IT managers and executives face explosive data growth, driving up costs of storage for backup and disaster recovery (DR). For this reason, data deduplication is regarded as the next evolutionary step in backup technology and a "must-have" for organizations that wish to remain competitive by operating as efficiently as possible. This paper explains in detail how data deduplication technology from FalconStor Software reduces backup storage requirements for backup and DR operations in a manner that exceeds other deduplication technologies. As IT managers and executives are looking at increasing business productivity and continuity, system and data availability becomes a priority. Traditional tape backup has been replaced by disk-todisk (D2D) backup to accelerate the backup and recovery process and in turn to improve operational efficiency. However, managers moving to D2D backup solutions face explosive data growth, driving up costs of storage for backup and disaster recovery (DR). Each time a full backup is performed, it contains many of the same files and data as prior full backups, leading to multiple copies of the same data, taking up valuable disk capacity. The same applies to duplicate data within a backup job, across servers, and across backup jobs (full and incremental) over

When the U.S. Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, among the law's many provisions was the establishment of formal regulations designed to protect the confidentiality and security of patient information. Congress set a series of deadlines for healthcare institutions to comply with the new regulations, including an April 2005 deadline for the security requirements. In addition to mandating new policies and procedures, the HIPAA security regulations require mechanisms for controlling access to patient data on healthcare providers' information technology (IT) systems. As the April 2005 deadline draws closer, meeting these IT security and access management requirements is proving to be a challenge for many institutions, for a number of reasons, including: � Complex IT environments: Most hospitals' IT environments include a diverse assortment of legacy, PC and Web applications, both internal and external. Any access control methods they employ must address all applications and platforms in their environments. � Complex legacy applications: Many healthcare institutions still rely heavily on legacy systems for which the software code has grown increasingly complex over time. In many cases, institutions lack the resources to modify application code written years or decades earlier. � Unchartered Territory: While the body responsible for enforcing the HIPAA regulations, the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S.

The new FRCP amendments are critically important for both IT managers and business decision-makers to understand and consider, since they raise the importance of data governance practices to a new level. Instead of proper data retention being simply a best practice for organizations to follow, data retention is now a legal obligation that can carry with it serious consequences if managed poorly. While backup, archiving and other data retention capabilities are an important component of a proper data management strategy, organizations must adopt a holistic approach to managing data, particularly the growing proportion of electronically stored information that they manage. A number of important and substantive revisions to the FRCP went into effect on December 1, 2006. These changes represented several years of debate at various levels and will have a significant impact on electronic discovery and the management of electronic data within organizations that operate in the United States. In a nutshell, the changes to the FRCP require organizations to manage their data in such a way that this data can be produced in a timely and complete manner when necessary, such as during legal discovery proceedings. New Amendments to the FRCP The amendments to Rules 16, 26, 34, 37, 45 and revisions to Form 35 are aimed at electronically stored information (ESI).

This white paper is intended to be used as an educational tool to assist the reader in the following areas: � Develop a deeper understanding of Structured Product Labeling (SPL) � Discuss the goals and benefits of SPL � Understand the impact that SPL will have on your current labeling process � Identify additional resources for broadening SPL knowledge There are multiple sources of information (presentations, meetings, Web sites, and documents) that address SPL, including the FDA Draft Guidance entitled "Providing Regulatory Submissions in Electronic Format � Content of Labeling," Health Level 7 (HL7) Structured Product Labeling Specification, SPL Implementation Guide, and the FDA Web site. These can be accessed from the locations defined in the SPL Resources section of this document. This paper is meant to augment, not replace, existing SPL information and attempts to pull many of the topics from these various sources together into a single, comprehensive document. This white paper is intended to be used as an educational tool to assist the reader in the following areas: � Develop a deeper understanding of Structured Product Labeling (SPL) � Discuss the goals and benefits of SPL � Understand the impact that SPL will have on your labeling process � Identify additional resources for broadening SPL knowledge There are multiple sources of information (presentations, meetings, Web sites, and documents) that address SPL, including the FDA Draft Guidance entitled "Providing Regulatory Submissions in Electronic Format � Content of Labeling," Health Level 7 (HL7) Structured Product Labeling Specification, SPL Implementation Guide, and the FDA Web site.

Delivering world class healthcare and pharmaceutical services is the goal of every organization committed to patient health. And while healthcare is a discipline that dates Challenge Healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations must ensure flawless application delivery and scalability of operations, supporting a highly diverse audience and wide range of endpoint devices. They must protect patient records, maintain regulatory compliance and security. To stay competitive and relevant and be considered for stimulus and grants, the networks must be able to quickly evolve. And all of this must be achieved while also controlling costs. Solution Juniper's security and infrastructure solutions directly address the needs of the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, not only solving today's challenges but also enabling organizations to meet new challenges while controlling costs. Benefits � Simplified data center that can seamlessly support distributed locations and applications � Differentiated access and secured applications, data, and infrastructure that helps meet compliance requirements � A highly reliable provisioning, correlation, and reporting system with a single operating system � Network systems that grow with the organization's needs while reducing total cost of ownership back to ancient times, modernization of the healthcare system has heralded new advances in the field. It has also created that did not need to be considered until now.

In recent years, email has emerged as the primary channel of business communication for organizations in every industry. Email contains enormous amounts of important and useful content, including contracts, proposals, presentations, policy decisions and other business records. However, a growing number of repositories � including Microsoft SharePoint�, Quickr� file servers, collaboration tools and various other application databases � also contain important electronic content. The explosive growth in business records being stored electronically means that "data retention" or "content retention" has increasingly come to mean "electronic data retention" or "electronic content retention." IT decision makers, recommending influencers and other business decision-makers need to understand that retaining email and other electronic content is necessary to satisfy litigation and regulatory compliance requirements, not to mention the growing demand for valuable business knowledge constantly being mined by an organization's employees. In today's highly regulated business environment, all organizations, regardless of size or industry, have electronic content retention obligations. All organizations are at risk of court-imposed sanctions if they do not preserve and produce electronic data in compliance with applicable court rules, case law and regulations. Many organizations continue to struggle with the challenges of having to retain large volumes of email and other content.

The recent economic downturn and corporate scandals compounded concerns of corporate accountability and confidence in U.S businesses. To improve shareholder confidence in management's ability to self-govern, the Federal Government implemented strict regulatory protocols to help restore accountability and improve public as well as shareholder confidence. The primary example of course is the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 which sought lasting eradication of corporate corruption by implementing specific controls across key financial business processes. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act tightens the corporate governance responsibilities of senior management and audit committees, requiring increased accountability and the disclosure of far more financial information than in the past. Specifically, it makes CEOs and CFOs explicitly responsible for establishing, evaluating and monitoring the effectiveness of internal controls over financial reporting and disclosure, and requires auditors to attest to management's assessment. As a result, businesses are finding themselves perplexed as to how to effectively implement the necessary control systems and measures to ensure compliance and avoid penalty. The challenge lies in dealing with the additional IT costs associated with not only the initial re-engineering and documentation of existing IT and business processes -- but in implementing an infrastructure capable of proving compliance on an on-going basis, in costeffective manner.

Archiving electronic content � the processes and technologies associated with retaining electronic content for long periods � is a critical best practice that every company should follow. Retaining important content for the appropriate length of time is necessary to satisfy legal obligations to retain business records; to satisfy regulatory requirements to keep certain types of data, sometimes indefinitely; and to permit access to older data in a centralized content repository that will make it easy for IT, end users and others to meet their content requirements. As well, there are other benefits associated with archiving electronic content, including the ability to make email and other application servers more efficient by offloading older content, speeding backup and recovery processes, and improving an organization's disaster preparedness and their ability to maintain the continuity of the business after natural disasters, power outages and the like. That said, most companies do not archive their electronic content in a coordinated or meaningful way. Osterman Research has found in numerous market research surveys that only about two in five organizations has a true archiving system � one that will index all content that should be retained for long periods, place this content into archival storage it cannot be modified, and make it available via robust search tools when data must be extracted from the archive.