Despite the prolonged winter storm of historic impact throughout Sevocity’s home state of Texas, as well as through many of our customers’ home regions, Sevocity maintained uninterrupted operational status.
Sevocity’s production system resides in a colocation data center in Central Texas. The region was amid significant calamities due to the winter storm, with the most pertinent effects being electric power outages, internet outages, degraded cellular networks and water availability.
Sevocity Operations monitored and assessed frequent updates during the fluid situation. However, our confidence in the continued availability of Sevocity systems was never shaken because Sevocity is well postured for just such events. Sevocity leadership selected our data center partner with the utmost importance being a shared commitment to the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (aka as “the CIA Triad” in the IT Security industry) of patient data throughout typical and atypical scenarios. This atypical – and perhaps once in a lifetime – winter storm particularly emphasized the importance of maintaining the Availability of patient data.
To maintain uninterrupted services the data center seamlessly executed redundancy plans designed for just such unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events. A less prepared data center – or a non-centrally managed database solutions hosted within clinics – would have potentially rendered systems inaccessible/unreliable for the weeklong duration of the storm and its aftermath. Which in turn would have adversely impacted ongoing patient care.
With the entire Texas power grid exhausted and on the verge of catastrophic failure, local utility providers were ordered to dramatically and immediately reduce load from the grid. This led utility providers to implement intentional (and unintentional) power outages throughout the region; the power outages in many cases extended to days. Sevocity’s colocation data center was not immune to this. In fact, they too shared the burden of reducing the load from the power grid and ran uninterrupted on only generator power for approximately a day. They were well prepared to continue on generator power uninterrupted for days more if necessary.
The data center is also network carrier neutral with access to 16+ network providers. Despite widespread network outages in the region, the data center and Sevocity remained readily accessible via internet.
The storm has now passed. Other storms and unforeseen circumstances will come. Sevocity remains vigilant and appreciative of the trust our customers place upon us as their healthcare system provider day-in and day-out – even during the anomalous day(s).
Peter Coronado, Sevocity IT