iPassport Quality Management System - Secure Hosting Information : Genial Genetics

Medical Institutions are increasingly adopting an internal market for IT support, that is, the provision of this is charged to each department based on the type of service and the amount of time involved. A hosted solution releases departments from spending funds on local IT support and this has the potential to save money. For example:

A hosted service solution can save money in other ways, for example, on capital expenditure as there is no need to purchase or maintain an application server (which would be necessary if the application were to be installed within your Institution).

Hosting the application and data off-site can also bolster resilience as more often than not server downtime is lower than is typically achieved by medical institutes. Again, potential cost savings can be made in this area.

Being a browser based product, one of the major advantages of iPassport QMS is that it will run on virtually any PC (or Mac) having access to the Internet. The minimum PC specification required to run iPassport QMS will therefore be significantly lower than is typically required to run a thick-client solution. With this being the case, iPassport QMS will run on existing PCs and networks with this having the effect of reducing the overall cost of implementing a quality management system.

In conclusion therefore, it is most unlikely that an off-site hosting solution is more expensive than an Intranet solution when local systems and data storage management costs are taken into consideration.

Remote Support Link

When a problem is reported using the iPassport on-line Contact Support link provided within the application, our team of specialists at Genial Genetics instantly receive messages on their Blackberries and email accounts. Problems are quickly rectified and uploaded into your live account with no impact on users.

Data Centre Security

The data centre chosen by Genial Genetics to host the iPassport application is one of the most highly-specified data centres. It provides facilities management, security, and dedicated floor space for network and data equipment. The data centre is covered by 24/7 CCTV, constantly monitoring all entries and exits. The data centre keeps an audit trail of people who enter the building, and strictly limits access to the data hosting floor area to its employees and operates with a 24 hour security team, PAC tags/swipe card access to data floor and visual ID verification on entering the building.

The live hosted iPassport solution uses an https connection with TLS 128bit encryption. TLS works by encrypting the data at the client side (web browser) using an authenticated security certificate and decrypting the data on the web/application server (iPassport). Therefore no plain text information is sent between the two points. This is identical to Internet Banking secure payment methods provided by the Internet.

It is not possible for anyone at the data-centre to see iPassport data as we have full root access control of the servers and lock out everybody but ourselves.

The company has a confidentiality policy covering our iPassport QMS system administrators which prevents them from copying or disclosing the content of the data to third parties, or to anyone else within the company.

Optimised Uptime

The iPassport application and stored data is hosted on dual (mirrored) high capacity servers at a secure data center. Information held is replicated between the servers in real time so in the event that one of the servers fails the other takes over immediately to optimise system uptime.

Data Backup Regime

Back-ups on-site in the hosting centre are located on three different physical storage locations. Two of those are synchronised in real-time; the third is backed up nightly. In addition to this, we back up off-site nightly. As the system never actually deletes records, incremental backups are not needed so a backup containing all data entered into the system is always maintained.