Amid a global pandemic, many industries are being forced to evolve their data storage and security capabilities or suffer the consequences. One such sector is healthcare.

Scality Inc, a company that provides storage software with capabilities within the cloud through products like Ring and Zenko, is helping healthcare organizations rapidly pivot during an unprecedented time.

“We now have something like 40 hospital systems globally using our product … to retain medical images for long-term retention,” said Paul Speciale (pictured), chief product officer at Scality. “These are things like digital diagnostic images, MRIs, CAT scans, CT scans. These hospitals are mandated to keep them for long term … sometimes for five years, 10 years, or even patient lifetime.”

Speciale spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. They discussed healthcare and specific use cases for data storage and management. (* Disclosure below.)

Healthcare moves into cloud with data management and disaster recovery

Scality is helping healthcare customers more effectively manage unstructured data. This is a perfect use case for what Scality does — capacity-optimized storage for long-term retention, according to Speciale. But Scality’s products can also be used for other things — like backups of electronic patient records, which are typically stored in databases.

“In a hospital, think about all the different medical image studies that they have — things like digital files for CAT scans and MRIs,” Speciale said. “These are becoming huge files. One multi-slice X-ray or digital scan, for example, can be gigabytes in size and per file — and that’s per patient. And now think about the number of patients and the retention of all of that.”

When it comes to the cloud, healthcare is embracing it with varied enthusiasm, according to Speciale. But on the data management side, Scality deals with a lot of use cases that involve taking older data from on-prem and archiving it long term in a HIPAA-compliant cloud in the U.S. for long-term retention, Speciale explained. And, healthcare organizations are learning that the cloud is helpful for having second copies for continued operations in disaster-recovery situations.

“We all know that hospitals have an absolute uptime need. They need to be running 24 by seven. One of the things that’s starting to happen is rather than a second physical data center, they establish a second site in a public cloud … to have this sort of cloud disaster-recovery solution,” Speciale concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE