Kern Medical Center

90%

Management time savings

42

Days of additional productivity gained

Near-zero

RTOs

Overview

Located in Bakersfield, California, Kern Medical Center is a leading Central Valley healthcare organization with a modern 222-bed public hospital, a comprehensive ofering of primary care and specialty clinics, and a large body of highly skilled doctors, nurses, technicians, and other health-care providers. Kern Medical is the only Level II trauma center in the area and prides itself on providing unparelled service to patients.

Craig Witmer, CTO, is responsible for modernizing the organization’s IT infrastructure to enable better patient care. “We underwent a complete technological refresh and infrastructure upgrade in anticipation of implementing a new EMR (electronic medical record) system. This will allow our clinicians to access data on-demand from their mobile devices, meaning they can serve patients in a more nimble and efficient manner,” said Witmer.

We are protecting all of our mission-critical applications with Rubrik, including our EMR system, radiology applications, epilepsy monitoring unit, as well as financial and billing systems.

Craig Witmer
CTO

Featured Product: Rubrik Cloud Data Management

Challenges

Time-consuming and errorprone legacy solution
Lengthy restores from tape
Inability to move to the cloud

Results

90%+ management time savings with Rubrik
42 days of additional productivity back to the orginization
Near-zero RTOs
Seamless archival to Microsoft Azure

Business Transformation

Gaining 42 days per year of productivity
IT team able to re-allocate their time to higher-value projects, including the rollout of a new EMR system
Quick recovery from ransomware attack achieved data assurance and mitigated business risk

Challenges

Frustration with outdated legacy solution and constant babysitting

Prior to Rubrik, the organization employed a tape-based legacy solution that was fraught with hardware issues and required perpetual babysitting. “As a lean IT team, we needed a platform that was easy to use and required little to no maintenance. Immutability to defend against ransomware was also key as healthcare organizations are popular targets for hackers. We also needed a solution that would allow us to future-proof our infrastructure and Rubrik checked all the boxes,” said Witmer.

“Rubrik has worked exactly as advertised; the solution enables us to keep on-premises backups without the overhead and complications of a tape-centric system. Some of our records need to be readily available for 25 years; with Rubrik, we’ve been able to archive our data to Azure with Rubrik’s seamless cloud integration,” added Witmer.

We cannot afford downtime or data loss, so having a robust data management solution like Rubrik is critical.

Craig Witmer
CTO

Solutions

Kern successfully recovers from ransomware with Rubrik

“As a healthcare facility, our systems need to be available at all times,” said Witmer. “Extended outages can severely impact our ability to provide care to our patients. Cyber attacks, especially in the form of ransomware, are a big problem for the healthcare industry. Protecting our data in the event of an attack is one of the most important functions of our data management system.”

“We were hit with a ransomware attack in June that infiltrated our environment and began encrypting data, rendering it unusable,” said Witmer. “The attack was discovered after an hour when users reported they couldn’t access their systems. Rubrik helped us quickly recover 100% of the systems it was protecting. After the incident, we were so impressed that we moved more of our legacy systems to Rubrik and are fully confident that Rubrik’s immutable backups will protect us from future incidents.”

Kern Medical is utilizing Rubrik to protect its virtualized environment, including Windows, Linux, SQL, and Oracle.

Rubrik helped us quickly recover 100% of the systems it was protecting... [we] are fully confident that Rubrik’s immutable backups will protect us from future incidents

Craig Witmer
CTO

Featured: Rubrik CDM

The Results

90%+ management time savings

“The time we spend maintaining our backups has decreased drastically with Rubrik. Previously, our team spent an hour per day managing tapes and re-running backup jobs. With Rubrik, we spend a few minutes checking our daily report and that’s it.”

Near-zero RTOs

“With our legacy system, restores could take hours—even if we had the necessary tapes onsite. Rubrik allows us to restore in seconds; the difference is night and day.”

Seamless archival to Microsoft Azure

“As a healthcare organization, we are required to retain data for up to 25 years for pediatric patients. With Rubrik, we were able to archive our data in Azure and quickly retrieve any information if necessary.”

World-class support

“With Rubrik, everything has been as advertised, but on top of that, we’re very impressed with their support. Our account team and support team have always done their best to address our needs.