Bermuda Hospitals Board to Implement State-of-the-Art Information Disaster Recovery System

(Hamilton, Bermuda, October 18, 2005) – The Bermuda Hospitals Board is implementing a state-of-the-art disaster recovery system to secure the hospitals’ 6 terabits (or six trillion bytes) of medical and financial records. The upgraded live system will be located in King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. A mirror-image system will be maintained in a secure off-site location, which will have capacity to serve as the main system in the event of unscheduled down-time.

“We need access to critical data in the event of an emergency that impacts the physical site of the computer system,” said Joan Dillas-Wright, Chief Executive Officer of the Bermuda Hospitals Board. “Our recent accreditation exercise underscored the need for disaster recovery technology that would allow access to data at critical times. We are pleased to report that we are now implementing this plan.”

“Having a sound disaster recovery system is particularly important in light of increased risk due to natural disasters and emerging healthcare standards for secure electronic medical records,” said Danny Dunlop, Sales and Professional Services Manager for Bermuda Computer Services, the local agent for IBM. “We are delighted to be working closely with the BHB on this information disaster recovery facility. This initiative puts the BHB in a lead position among Bermuda’s government agencies for this type of hot-site back-up capability.”

While IBM provides the iSeries hardware and operating software, there will be service providers and specialized software in place to mirror transactions in the back-up system to ensure accurate data capture and integrity. The systems will communicate through a secure high-speed network which will allow users to access data and applications on both production and stand-by systems, for seamless cut-over in the event of unscheduled downtime in the production system. The system is targeted to be in place by early 2006 and represents continuing efforts in the “refresh” of technology throughout the BHB’s medical facilities.

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