Prepare for outages in the social and health care information system – choose ERA for backup

29.5.2023

Unplanned downtime of information systems can be prepared for. Atostek’s ERA system can function as a parallel backup system for use during an outage of the main system.

Information systems can be out of order in both planned and unplanned ways. Planned outages can be due to system or infrastructure upgrades, for example, and can be scheduled for off-peak times such as nights and weekends. Unplanned outages, on the other hand, are caused by errors and problems or external events such as denial of service attacks, and obviously cannot be predicted or scheduled.

Problems with information systems can be tackled both through contracts and technical solutions. Contracts involve reaching agreement on the service levels to be achieved and the technical solutions to be implemented. Technical solutions can include application, server and communication layer duplications, and more.

How to prepare for outages?

Despite all the precautions that can be taken, problems caused by outages cannot be completely prevented. Even a planned outage will hamper activities if there is no natural break and operations run around the clock. In addition, an operation carried out during the outage, such as a system update, may fail and cause the downtime to extend beyond the planned duration. However, not all technical problems can be prevented by doubling, and the mechanisms of doubling are themselves prone to their own kinds of errors.

A less commonly used, but simple and cost-effective fallback mechanism is a separate, parallel backup system that can be used during a main system outage.

ERA as a backup system

In the social and healthcare sector, for instance, Atostek ERA can be used as a parallel backup system.

ERA retrieves social welfare and healthcare data directly from the Kanta Services and is therefore independent of the organization’s own patient and customer information systems and their suppliers.
As a cloud service, ERA is independent of the customer organization’s own data connections, servers and workstations, as well as those of the source system provider.
In addition to viewing data, ERA also allows data to be entered, for example if doctors need to write urgent prescriptions.

Deploying ERA as a standalone backup system requires configuring the organization and its users, and installing a smart card reader driver on the users’ computers. When ERA is used as a backup system, pricing is based on actual usage.