Well that's your problem, right there:
Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a number of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the facilities to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.
CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the company’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affected “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” Trade publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.
The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not related to a cyberattack or other security incident.
Everything is "cloud" these days. Having worked in cloud for a decade, it's really really hard to get good reliability. The best vendors promise "Five Nines" reliability, i.e. uptime of 99.999%. The very best vendors have compensation clauses in their contracts and pay penalties to customers when they don't meet the uptime agreement.
Five Nines means that you will have no more than five minutes of downtime in a year. Like I said, this is really hard stuff.
Oracle Health had this customer down for five days. This translates to less than 99% uptime - probably 98.5%. Not a good look for a cloud provider.
Even worse, this isn't the first problem for Oracle Health. Oracle Health's Federal cloud went down for a day last month, taking 6 VA Hospitals and 26 clinics with them.
If you're in IT and looking at cloud services (and why wouldn't you?), pay special attention to the Service Level Agreements. SLAs with penalty clauses mean that the vendor is serious about reliability.
6 comments:
Most people have NO IDEA how dependent hospitals are on IT and networks. And it's worse if the design doesn't include planned redundancy, which is rare because that costs money. Without network connectivity a modern radiology department is useless. Might as well close the doors and send everyone home. I spent 12 years as a PACS/Network admin and things were precarious then...and that was almost a decade ago. It's worse now.
Cloud: The Ultimate Vaporware.
Of course, the REAL question should be:
"Who has access to your info in the "cloud" when it IS up?"
Fourteen Eyes, baby!
The 'cloud', e.g. somebody else's computer... sigh
Never liked "The Cloud". When I worked in Metrology, management was on an outsourcing kick for all in company service functions. We were able to show them that it would impact productivity if we shut down the Metrology/Calibration Lab and made it just a pass through to external sources.
"The Cloud" is the same. You are outsourcing all of your data resources to another party. You loose control and are at their mercy. On the face of it, "The Cloud" might look less expensive but if it shuts you down, it can be costly. And it can be costly even with compensation and penalty clauses in the contracts; the provider would probably try to weasel out of paying if they can.
Also having to run through the Internet, you can be at jeopardy if the external network goes down. Recently there was a major Internet backbone cable cut in North Texas that took out the Internet for hours.
What happens to the Cloud on a Sunny Day.
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