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CareGroup
Healthcare Group Upgrading to SQL Server 2008 to Better Protect 2 Terabytes of Data
https://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000001003
CareGroup Healthcare System is responsible for protecting the privacy and integrity of 2 terabytes of patient information and related data. Based in Boston, CareGroup is the corporate parent of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, and three other area hospitals. CareGroup hosts its data on 390 databases on 30 instances of Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005. The organization is updating databases to SQL Server 2008 to take advantage of new features including advanced auditing and transparent encryption to help it meet HIPAA and other regulatory requirements. CareGroup is using the Declarative Management Framework, new for SQL Server 2008, to enforce policy and schema across its operations, and is centralizing reporting using SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services accessed through a portal created using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
“The enhanced auditing of SQL Server 2008 enables us to track all changes to tables and other data elements in our system,” says Shammout. “We can track all inserts, deletions, and other actions to who and when, and store all of this in a SQL Server repository for reporting against. From an administrative point we have complete transparency. And if a patient wants to know who viewed their records and when, all of that information will be preserved and instantly available.”
“We didn’t feel we could take full advantage of the encryption feature in earlier versions of SQL Server because it required modification on the application and on the client side, which was a big issue for us. With SQL Server 2008 we have transparent encryption, so we can easily enforce the encryption of the information in the database itself without making any changes on the application side.”
“Data collection is now built into SQL Server 2008 so I don’t have to continually update my own application and write scripts from scratch to collect the information a database administrator needs to keep operations up and optimally running,” says Shammout.
CyberSavvy
Software Company Creates Automated ‘Database Factory’ Using SQL Server 2008
https://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000001007
CyberSavvy believes in using software automation to make life easier for its customers. Its Software as a Service solution, DataPlace, which it terms a “database factory,” enables technical and business oriented customers to create and modify their own databases, hosted by CyberSavvy. The company needed a rock-solid database with a faultless data transfer mechanism to support communication between its client-side SmartClient and backend databases. CyberSavvy deploys its solutions on the Microsoft® Application Platform, using Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 Enterprise Edition on the hosted server side, and SQL Server 2008 Express Edition on the client side. CyberSavvy has enjoyed a number of benefits from using SQL Server 2008 including an integrated development environment, reduced storage needs with Backup Compression, easier automation using SQL Server Service Broker, and scalability.
“As a software service provider, we do a lot of backups,” says Hammond. “Our service level agreements call for incremental backups every 15 minutes and full database backups every night. We are already up to a terabyte of backups, so anything we can do to reduce the space required for backing data is helpful. We’re anticipating an 80 percent reduction in our backup file sizes using backup compression on SQL Server 2008.”
“One of our big reasons for moving to SQL Server 2008 so early was its scaling factor,” says Hammond. “We are hosting hundreds of databases on a single instance with fantastic success. We are currently at about 500 gigabytes with more than 150 publications and plan to grow into a multi-terabyte provider. We can handle enterprise customers, and we don’t see a limit to our ability to scale.”
“Our developers are skilled professionals with years of experience,” says Hammond. “But our work was much easier because of how well SQL Server 2008 is integrated with Microsoft’s state-of-the-art development tools and technologies.”