Everyone has made a trip to the pharmacy at some point in their lives. But have you ever stopped to think about the technologies pharmacies utilize and how much data they’re generating, sharing, and storing on a daily basis?
There are many steps that go into the process of getting the right medication into the hands of the right patient, at the right time. Pharmacies today manage massive amounts of valuable patient information, and it’s their responsibility to do so securely and efficiently to ensure customers receive the best possible care.
When it comes to implementing IT systems and managing patient data, there are a few requirements that are common amongst pharmacies. These include:
- Data Security: As mentioned above, pharmacies are responsible for managing large amounts of confidential patient information — including contact details, illnesses, medication, insurance, dosages, etc. Keeping this data safe and secure is vital to running a successful pharmacy and maintaining customer trust. Pharmacies must have proper data security practices and technologies in place, to ensure their customer information is kept safe.
- High Availability: Pharmacies are essential businesses and their customers often rely on certain medications to keep themselves and their families healthy and functioning. They are also typically busy and need to be able to access different applications and patient data at all times, to fulfill the needs of their customers. It is for these reasons that pharmacies require IT systems that are highly available and resilient to downtime.
- Lightweight and Affordable: Pharmacies are frequently found within supermarket chains, which often have hundreds to thousands of store locations. Deploying complex IT hardware at each individual store is not only incredibly expensive, but can also take up a lot of space (which can be hard to come by within supermarkets). Pharmacies need IT solutions that are compact and reasonably priced, to decrease costs and technology footprint per site.
As pharmacies become increasingly reliant on data and technology to carry out their day-to-day operations, it’s important that they implement IT solutions that are secure, reliable, lightweight, and cost-effective.
StorMagic SvSAN and SvKMS for Pharmacies
A popular, US-based supermarket chain chose to deploy both StorMagic SvSAN and SvKMS across over 200 different store locations, to support its in-house pharmacies. The business had previously been dealing with numerous outages, high costs, and unreliable data protection, and was looking to upgrade to address these struggles.
The supermarket chain chose to deploy StorMagic SvSAN to provide its in-house pharmacies with the high availability that they desperately needed. SvSAN helped the supermarket chain eliminate their outages, and was an incredibly lightweight option, requiring just two servers (nodes) at each site. SvSAN’s minimal hardware requirements made it very simple and affordable to implement across the chain’s hundreds of locations.
The chain also chose to invest in SvSAN’s built-in encryption feature, to keep the confidential pharmacy data safe and secure, and used SvKMS, StorMagic’s encryption key management solution, to centralize the management of the organization’s encryption keys. By deploying the two products together, the business was able to greatly simplify their in-store IT infrastructure, as well as their key management operations within their datacenter. The cost and time savings they realized as a result were a huge benefit for the business.
For more information on applying StorMagic solutions within a retail environment, visit our retail industry solutions page for plenty of useful content. Furthermore, click here to learn more about StorMagic SvSAN, and here for additional information about SvKMS.
