 |
Phone & Whatsapp:(410)988-7777 |
 |
 |
 |
.
It seems that many vendors are offering cloud solutions for PACS systems, where radiology centers do not store images locally. Instead they send it via gateways to a centralized storage at remote data centers. This strategy may or may not work well when studies are only needed to be kept for a few months. But when studies are needed to be stored for seven, or ten years, no one knows for sure if the vendor will remain in business that long. They may go out of business, and simply disappear. That could happen to small and large vendors alike.
Many companies are charging you upfront for 7, or even 10 years of storage, but in fact they may be spending your money much quicker than that, way before seven or ten years. Not to mention that they already invested heavily to start the business; large data centers, thousands of servers. Electricity cost, personnel, etc. if that is the case; they need you to keep spending money so that they cover the cost of previously stored studies. Not only that, they have to maintain a steady stream of new clients, just to cover the cost of previously stored studies.
Wrong, cloud computing is not similar to the bank paradigm. Banks use your money to lend it and make profit from it. However with radiology images, unless the vendor benefits in some form or the other from site visitors; charging for ads for example, that theory will not apply. It may work for free email accounts, and other light storage based applications, where the ratio between site visits and storage capacity is relatively small.
That is not always true; you still have to use your bandwidth to push your studies via the locally installed gateway to the remote data center. If you don’t have a local PACS, and you’re only pushing studies to the remote server, you may be in trouble if the gateway is flooded with studies too quickly, or if it stops functioning. Or if your internet connection dies. Then, you neither have your studies stored locally nor remotely. Can’t even have a reading physician read them, even if he is right there at the facility.
If a reading physician is located inside that facility, and you’re only storing studies remotely, you’re sending studies away, to be pulled back down, using your bandwidth twice for the same study, where you should not be using it at all. That study should be retrieved locally.
If the vendor is competent, that statement is true, but it's only true compared to a full in-house solution. Meaning that archive server is local, and you are also maintaining your domain, security, web server, application server, user authentication and user roles, load balancing, etc. However, if much of the overhead is handled centrally, and you only have the archive server locally, that theory may not apply. Instead it gives you an advantage in case you lose your internet connection. In that case you can continue operating locally.
Xrayline maintains central portal servers in our data center, providing you with communication infrastructure, and a single point of access, handles, security, load balancing, routing, user authentication, user roles, and more. But studies are not store centrally; instead studies are stored on your site, and on your hardware. We remotely install and maintain an enterprise archive server on your hardware, providing you with the benefit of an expensive archive server, with online access, without the maintenance and administration overhead. In case you wish to cancel the service, you keep your fully functional local archive server, along with your studies.