Monday, February 1, 2010

An electronic notebook not only facilitates the workflow, capturing the knowledge created, but can also store that knowledge for the organization so that it can defend its intellectual property or meet government regulations. Compared to the ad-hoc process that the application replaces (often a combination of loosely organized notes and electronic documents) the overall productivity and efficiency of the scientific process can be greatly improved. Digitizing the process also improves the ability of the organization to retain information for internal or regulatory purposes. Most importantly an electronic lab notebook application provides the ability to search and find that information quickly when needed.

The Cloud Archiving Integration Opportunity:  What has been missing for Rescentris and other electronic lab notebook developers was the ability to automate the long term archival of the projects from within the application. Without the ability to archive specific projects there is not only the concern about the size and cost of the on-site storage but more importantly there may be concerns about establishing and documenting a chain of custody for official electronic records. Most scientific research is heavily regulated and there is often a requirement to prove a data set’s immutability.

To solve this problem Rescentris turned to Iron Mountain’s Archive Services Platform and their API to allow Rescentris to seamlessly and tightly integrate secure cloud storage into their electronic lab notebook application. Iron Mountain was a logical choice for Rescentris, since most of their customers already had a relationship with Iron Mountain or at least are aware of the company’s reputation for preserving both the physical and data informational assets of an organization. “Our customers rely on our electronic notebook application, CERF, to capture and share scientific information and to create their records”, stated Rescentris president Jeff Spitzner. “For the long-term management of records required for patent, FDA, e-Discovery, and other complex and ever-changing regulations, there is no more trusted partner than Iron Mountain. This solution is the best insurance policy to protect their records and R&D investments.”

As Storage Switzerland covered in its recent article “The Importance of a Cloud Storage API”, an API set like the one developed by Iron Mountain allows ISVs to make movement of data to the cloud as simple as a check box or menu choice within their application. With Iron Mountain’s API the ISV can also set such parameters as retention time and security control.

The ISV can also offer other rich records management functionality such as metadata tagging to improve search performance and accuracy when retrieving long ago archived data. As an archive grows, this eliminates the challenge of trying to find a needle in a haystack, which often results in not finding any information or finding too much information. With the application automatically providing some of the key tags, it should allow the users to quickly retrieve just the information they want.

One of the key requirements for Rescentris when selecting a cloud storage option was the stability of the cloud storage provider itself and nothing proves this more than longevity of their business. One of the reasons Rescentris chose Iron Mountain was because of their almost seven decades of experience storing and protecting customer information and 15 years of experience when it comes to protecting data remotely. As stated earlier, Rescentris spoke with its customers about various cloud offerings and most of them trusted having their information with Iron Mountain, making it easy to develop the partnership.

Speed To Market Key:  Any ISV that wants to add cloud storage to their software application wants to do so in a time effective manner. Most ISVs do not have the resources to dedicate teams of developers to an “archive–to-the-cloud” initiative and they certainly do not want to become experts in cloud storage. The role of an API set is that it allows the ISV to do the integration work quickly and then leverages the capabilities of the storage solution to do the rest of the work.

In the case of Rescentris the integration work with Iron Mountain’s API took less than two days. This is partly because their application is built to connect to web services technology and partly because of the strength of Iron Mountain’s API. They simply dropped in the Iron Mountain Web stack, picked the storage services they wanted to use and the effort was complete. “The integration was straightforward because of excellent documentation and support, and the robustness of the API to readily tailor the solution to use our globally unique customer record identifiers,”  stated Spitzner.

More Value For The End-User:  With the API integration complete Rescentris is now offering their customers a complete cradle to grave and back again workflow. This starts from the moment the scientist first walks into the lab and begins recording information in the application. All this information can now be captured, analyzed and reviewed by other team members. The process can also include the requirement of a co-worker sign-off to maintain compliance using digital signatures. Once the project is complete there is now an archive menu option that allows the project to be archived to Iron Mountain’s secure underground data centers. When a project has been archived the menu changes to “Retrieve.”

George Crump, Senior Analyst

In addition, Rescentris can take advantage of the Archive Services Platform’s rich functionality to offer other workflows such as the archival of paper documents that have been scanned and archiving all of pieces of a research project.

The value of this integrated work flow is that there are no boxes of tapes that need to be moved back and forth between the customer’s facility and their off-site storage facility. Also the data, thanks to metadata tagging, archived data can still be searched so that the right data can be recalled when the need arises. This leads to a savings not only in capacity by removing old projects, but also a savings in compliance management time since compliance and movement to a compliant storage is built right into the software. 

Conclusion:  Rescentris recognized an opportunity to provide their customers with further value, and made a smart “buy-build-partner” decision by partnering with Iron Mountain to offer integration to their Archive Services Platform. By having a clear set of decision criteria, and a solid understanding of the risk-profile of their customers, the natural choice became to partner with the leader in secure information management, Iron Mountain. Rescentris has taken a leap forward within the electronic lab notebook market by recognizing and fulfilling an unmet need for users in a very collaborative but tightly regulated industry.