Rush Memorial Hospital

How Clumio Backup as a Service Freed IT to Focus on the Patient Experience

Rush Memorial Hospital (RMH) has been serving the people of Indiana since its founding in 1950. As its CIO, Jim Boyer is responsible for finding and deploying technology that helps drive the hospital’s deep-rooted mission of community service. “Our job in IT,” said Jim “is to enhance the care we deliver to our patients, so they can better monitor their health and tie into hospital resources easily.”
Over the past couple years, Jim and his IT team have focused on transforming their core technologies. This means moving aggressively to the cloud where it makes sense. “When your IT team has a hundred different types of technologies to manage, you need to consolidate and simplify,” observed Jim. “You need to offload those functions that are important but will be better off automated.”

The Potential for Backup as a Service

A critical technology that Jim identified early as a possibility for SaaS was backup and recovery. Jim views data as the lifeblood of the hospital. His team is committed to ensuring its protection, but they were struggling with their existing vendor. “We were on a product that was software and storage-based and all on-prem,” recalled Jim. “And we got to the point where it just wasn’t working out at all. It was just stuck in the past—time consuming and complicated.”

The challenge was they couldn’t find a SaaS backup solution that fit their needs— either the product didn’t work as well as promised or was far too expensive. Until they discovered Clumio. When Jim first saw the Clumio service he thought it was almost too good to be true—it appeared so simple and straightforward. “I was sold as soon as we did the proof of concept,” stated Jim. “Once the backup started, I figured it would take a week or two but two days later and we’re all done. We moved 30 terabytes up to the cloud. That’s amazing.”

The Freedom of Moving to the Cloud

The most immediate business benefit Jim reaped from Clumio was to lower the time his team spent on everyday tasks and increase the time spent on impacting initiatives that support the mission of the hospital. “I had people spending four to five hours a week on backups,” claimed Jim. “It was ridiculous. Every day, it was always something and that’s just the way the conventional system worked.”

After only three months on the Clumio service, not only was it saving Jim five hours a week of full-time employees devoted to backup, it gave everyone, especially Jim, great peace of mind. For Jim, Clumio’s innovative support model provides him with continuous, proactive monitoring and automated detection. “I go in now and ask my team, how is Clumio working? They look at me and say, ‘I love it!’” I think where they feel most comfortable is if something happens overnight, we know Clumio’s on top of it. We engage with them in the morning and it’s already taken care of.”

Clumio’s ability to lower costs over time is not limited to where people spend their time, it also has helped with long term budget planning. “Everybody knows if you buy a storage system you have to spec it out into the future,” stated Jim. “Everybody has growth, but you can’t always predict growth. So, you have to add more infrastructure, and then maintenance becomes an issue and the demands on people resources increase.” A fully cloud-based approach reduces these planning concerns, making it easier to keep up with the pace of growth.

Restoring and Securing Data

Another key selling point for Jim was how long Clumio was capable of efficiently storing and retaining data. “I wanted to have some longevity on my backups,” stated Jim. “On my old storage system, I was probably getting six months at best and that ate up a lot of storage. With Clumio, I’m getting seven years. I can go back in time and pull files easily. From a legal and regulatory perspective, that’s huge. Imagine having your emails archived for seven years with the security, searchability and cost model that you need—that’s pretty impressive.”

Like most IT leaders moving their organization to the cloud, Jim was concerned about being able to protect his data once it moved off premises. And since RMH, as a healthcare provider, is governed by HIPAA and its high standards for managing and securing data, that challenge is only amplified. “The biggest worry for me,” admitted Jim, “was if I back this up in the cloud and somebody hacks in and compromises my data. But with Clumio, we have everything air-gapped. If we are under threat, we feel really good about being able to restore our systems in an effective and timely manner.”

Disruption Can Be a Good Thing

As part of its mission, RMH is committed to leading the way in healthcare, to offering their community the best and most advanced medical experience. And Jim applies this philosophy to technology as well. “A lot of old school folks start to freak out when you tell them you’re taking all your back up off prem,” said Jim. “But I tell them, imagine a world where you can have back up done right. It’s air-gapped and secure. You don’t have all the storage and infrastructure issues. You can do it very quickly and easily. I mean, you can literally engage with Clumio, and in a week they’ll change your whole backup life.”

Jim believes being comfortable with disruption can simplify things and deliver tremendous value—if you do it with the right partner. “I’ve got a list of my top vendors,” stated Jim. “And by far Clumio has been one that’s been a disruptor. I will say, if we could have every vendor work like this, everything would be great.”

So, while Jim is very comfortable with bringing in new and disruptive technology to deliver better service, he is also consistently focused on reliability. “I always tell my executive team, backup is true valuable insurance to your organization. That’s how I really look at the value of backup. It’s your insurance. But how well does your insurance work? That’s the thing. We feel that with backup from Clumio, we’re covered from roof to foundation.”