Redundancy, backup, hosting options, high availability, security, migration of data and our commitment to data availability

This documents objective is to answer questions about redundancy, backup, hosting options, high availability, security, migration of data and our commitment to data availability.

1.    VETport although cloud based is completely capable of running locally (your private cloud), and serving to the intranet and internet from the local site.  How hard would that be?  Not hard at all - an instance could be moved from the cloud and be up and running in a matter of hours(depending on database size) as long as the local hardware infrastructure was in place. However the Amazon cloud is an extraordinary infrastructure and we get to take advantage and leverage that infrastructure by being there. It is not absolutely required but is highly recommended.

2.    Create your own instance on Amazon or any other cloud. You can control your cloud wherever it is, independent of VETport.

3.    We of course offer backup strategies on the cloud included in our service. We offer a fee based backup solution to an offsite location as well. You can backup the full database at periodic intervals to an offsite location.

4.    VETport tables are fully accessible within VETport including the full xml based medical record. A clinic may take all or any set of tables once monthly at no charge. Pull them down and open them in excel! There is a nominal fee for downloads in excess of once monthly.  

5.    In addition to the tables and xml based medical record from within VETport you can download the following:  A folder per client, within each client folder a folder for all that client's pets, within each pet folder a pdf version of the medical record, an html version of the medical record, all images, and all attachments. These files and folders are generated at the time of your request through the browser. There is a small charge per client download for this file generation to offset the costs of generation and transmission. This is meant as a failsafe backup, and for anyone wishing to move to another system as it along with the tables and xml files provides in exquisite detail and machine readable format every aspect of the data within VETport, as well as an immediate human readable medical record in pdf or html.

6.    For very high availability needs, you can have 2 instances with a virtual failover. VETport is capable of transactional mirroring on 2 independent systems.

The possibilities with VETport are not limited unlike every other veterinary software we have seen and worked with. No other vendor has as open and available data as VETport.

No clinic among hundreds now has ever had significant connectivity or operational issues on our cloud. We have clinics across the world using VETport  i.e.  USA, Canada, Cayman Islands, South Africa, UAE, India, China,  Malaysia, Australia.

For connectivity issue we simply recommend a fallback internet access point. In my clinic we have an iPad on Verizon. It gives us complete continuity if there is a rare internet outage. For a large practice you may want a hotspot available or multiple tablet devices.  

If large companies can disappear overnight I am not going to suggest VETport as a going concern cannot. That said one's access to VETport data or your ability to continue with business is not going to disappear overnight.

Sincerely,

Tom