The Ottawa Hospital hosts its mission-critical disaster recovery systems on Microsoft Azure, cuts backup costs in half

The Ottawa Hospital is one of Canada’s foremost and largest health sciences centers, providing world-class care to 1.2 million people in Eastern Ontario and specialized care to residents of Nunavut. Specializing in tertiary-level and specialty care, it partners with leading research and education institutions like the University of Ottawa. Around 15,000 professionals work in the hospital, providing patient-centered care and compassion year-round.  

With its focus on world-class healthcare services, the hospital regularly takes advantage of the latest IT solutions. In early 2016, it decided to revamp its systems for storing electronic health records (EHR). To enable efficient record-sharing between its various sites and partner network known as the Atlas Alliance, the hospital elected to deploy an EHR system called Epic.  

Encountering costly hosting setbacks

To use Epic, the hospital required a purpose-built hosting infrastructure. Looking at a 10-year cost projection, the project team realized it could significantly reduce cost by hosting data on-premises instead of using other options. However, the hospital had an outdated secondary datacenter and would need to invest millions to make it operational as the disaster recovery site.  

The need for a best-in-class disaster recovery system further complicated the project. Access to data can have high-stakes consequences in a medical setting, so The Ottawa Hospital had to ensure it fully backed up every patient record with the latest data.   

Exploring cloud hosting opportunities 

To avoid the expensive on-premises hosting costs for disaster recovery, the project team began to look at cloud infrastructure as an alternative. As Daniel Breton, Infrastructure Manager at The Ottawa Hospital, recalls, “We did a high-level cost analysis, comparing Microsoft Azure pricing versus hardware purchasing costs. Even early on, we saw a 40 percent saving—a huge amount.”  

Six months before its Epic go-live date, the hospital decided to host its disaster recovery systems fully in Microsoft Azure. The providers of Epic had never supported a cloud-based project of this type before, making the installation one of the first of its kind.    

To tackle this highly ambitious project and get stakeholder approval, Breton’s team brought in Microsoft Partner Network member AirGate. “Once we found the right partner, it was easy,” says Breton. “We explained to our stakeholders the implementation process and the cost-effective benefits of having Microsoft manage the hardware.”   

Taking a cutting-edge approach to data recovery 

To build the disaster recovery infrastructure, the project team took advantage of Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capabilities. With Azure, IT teams can quickly build a highly secure environment that scales up and down with demand. This means that the hospital only pays for the resources it uses, and it can expand its capacities without procuring additional hardware.  

The hospital uses several other Microsoft technologies, including hosting Citrix on Azure and Azure Storage for medical imaging. The solution also continuously synchronizes the on-premises and disaster recovery databases, creating a mirror image of every EHR that updates in real time. The hospital uses Azure Site Recovery to deploy failover and recovery processes, should a data loss incident occur.   

The infrastructure is built using M-series Azure virtual machines, as Breton explains. “We saw the M-series as the best-in-class of virtual machines and determined it was necessary to support the database that Epic uses. At the time, it was very new. Microsoft stepped up and made it available to us, and that was critical.” 

Prioritizing security from day one 

Using the capabilities of Azure, the project team has strengthened the security of its cloud environment. For example, the hospital benefits from firewalls built into Azure. But the hospital and AirGate also built the cloud infrastructure in a way that helps insulate it from outside access.  

"Security and compliance are of paramount importance for our healthcare customers, especially when it comes to patient data such as medical imaging and EHR systems. We’ve built the Azure environment for The Ottawa Hospital to best-in-class security standards with advanced cloud security management and automation capabilities for this mission-critical project,” says Nicole Mumford, CEO of AirGate.   

As an added security benefit, The Ottawa Hospital uses Azure to help meet compliance obligations with the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA), the Canadian laws regarding data privacy.    

Saving time and money through innovation 

Carrying out this initiative in the cloud has led to significant cost savings. “To use on-premises datacenters, you have to make this huge initial investment to start using the technology,” says Breton. “With the cloud, you don’t need to stock up on components. You can just leverage the technology right away.”   

With the move to Azure, the hospital cut its data backup costs by half. “We were able to save almost 50 percent by hosting our disaster recovery environment for Epic and other critical systems in Azure,” says Breton.  

“Other than the databases that are always on and always replicating, we can spin down the whole virtualized environment so it runs idle. It’s very low cost.” Even more remarkable, the project teams built the cloud infrastructure in just three months. 

Setting new standards in IT for healthcare 

The Epic disaster recovery solution went live in April, 2019, and while the migration continues, The Ottawa Hospital and AirGate consider both to be landmark projects. Built in three months, the infrastructure will back up 700 terabytes of data, making real-time updates to files while supporting up to 5,300 concurrent users. It’s clear that The Ottawa Hospital takes world-class care of its data—just like it does with its patients.  

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