Scalable Iron Cloud storage for digital pathology slide images

Solution Guides

High-resolution whole slide images could exceed 1GB each, with labs potentially producing thousands of slides per day. This reality has healthcare organizations searching for storage strategies to make their digital pathology programs affordable and resilient.

October 31, 2023 mins
Digital Folders

Challenge

The digital pathology workflow is different. High-resolution whole slide images could exceed 1GB each, with labs potentially producing thousands of slides per day. This reality has healthcare organizations searching for storage strategies to make their digital pathology programs affordable and resilient.

Key considerations

laptop growth

Growing volumes of data are best managed by solutions with scalable capacity.

storage book

Storage models must be flexible enough to reduce complexity and meet a variety of accessibility needs.

price in format of coin

Predictable pricing structures can control costs while maintaining ease of data access.

secured personal info

The storage environment must be secure, protecting patient health information and ensuring data sovereignty.

What if you could

By working with Iron Mountain, your organization can take advantage of Iron Cloud Digital Pathology Storage. The solution supports your digital pathology storage strategy with three crucial benefits:

  • Scalability: Enjoy an elastic storage footprint that grows with you. Expand your storage of active data as needed with no hidden fees for egress, ingress, or access. Data lives securely in Iron Mountain’s Iron Cloud data centers. Digital slide images are available with a simple request and delivered via the cloud.
  • Cost-effective pricing: Remove the upfront expenses and complexities of tape infrastructure or onsite disk storage. Iron Mountain may lower your total cost of ownership with its inclusive and flexible multi-tiered pricing model.
  • Security: Known for its sophisticated security measures, Iron Mountain maintains data encryption when your information is in transit and at rest. Iron Mountain’s zero trust network architecture is designed to ensure data integrity, cybersecurity, and data durability. This means your slide images are protected— supporting compliance, research, and value creation.

The Iron Cloud Digital Pathology Storage solution works as an ideal complement to your organization’s deployment of Digital Pathology on Demand, an as-a-service solution from Iron Mountain. Digital slide images are securely stored in the Iron Mountain Cloud while physical slides remain safe in Iron Mountain vaults.


How it works


The Iron Cloud Digital Pathology Storage solution combines multi-tiered storage options with an on-demand pricing model that includes online access, data protection, and archiving. Here’s the process:

  • Customers can request and retrieve data immediately from the Active/Hot Tier which uses the industry standard S3 Protocol.
  • Iron Cloud creates two identical copies of digital slides from the Active/Hot tier that are stored in Warm and Cold tiers.
  • Warm tier data can be retrieved within minutes to hours. Cold tier data is kept as archival to meet compliance and other requirements.
  • Iron Mountain manages the data lifecycle policy, maintaining multiple copies of data on multiple copies of media, stored in multiple locations even after the data ages out of the Active/Hot Tier.