Just wondering what people's views are.
We recently had an incident where a major group of hospitals had moved all their IT services to a datacenter about 20 miles away. One day, a few weeks ago, something catastrophic happened, somewhere along the line, and all network connectivity with the datacenter was lost.
All local applications (e.g. electronic patient record, PACS (X-ray/CT scan/MRI scan viewing), bookings, test ordering, results, blood transfusion, OR record keeping systems, e-mail/blackberry mail, VOIP phones, etc.) were down for about 24 hours. As you might imagine, this caused total chaos - as people had to go back to pen/paper fall-back methods. And then there was the massive backlog that had to be transcribed when the systems came back the next day.
There's been no word on the cause of the failure, and not even my departmental IT admin knows anything about it. I wonder if there is some sort of NDA clause in the contract with the ASP/datacenter.
It's far from clear whether the fact that the hosting was outsourced was relevant, but nonetheless, I'd be interested to hear opinions from people about whether this sort of thing is good or bad, and whether the size of the enterprise is relevant (for point of reference, there are about 10,000 employees here).
We recently had an incident where a major group of hospitals had moved all their IT services to a datacenter about 20 miles away. One day, a few weeks ago, something catastrophic happened, somewhere along the line, and all network connectivity with the datacenter was lost.
All local applications (e.g. electronic patient record, PACS (X-ray/CT scan/MRI scan viewing), bookings, test ordering, results, blood transfusion, OR record keeping systems, e-mail/blackberry mail, VOIP phones, etc.) were down for about 24 hours. As you might imagine, this caused total chaos - as people had to go back to pen/paper fall-back methods. And then there was the massive backlog that had to be transcribed when the systems came back the next day.
There's been no word on the cause of the failure, and not even my departmental IT admin knows anything about it. I wonder if there is some sort of NDA clause in the contract with the ASP/datacenter.
It's far from clear whether the fact that the hosting was outsourced was relevant, but nonetheless, I'd be interested to hear opinions from people about whether this sort of thing is good or bad, and whether the size of the enterprise is relevant (for point of reference, there are about 10,000 employees here).
