Ground was broken in the Des Moines area this week for a new data center that’ll house digitized information on hundreds of thousands of Iowans. It’ll be the computer storehouse for several clients, including the Iowa Health System, which encompasses 14 Iowa hospitals and more than 70 medical offices and health clinics.
Kate Miller, director of business development for Cedar Falls-based TEAM Companies, says more businesses are seeing the value of this sort of data center as a vital back-up plan, especially after this year’s severe bouts with tornadoes and flooding.
Miller says: "People use it as a disaster recovery site, a secondary site for their data. If something happened where their business flooded and they went down, they would be able to continue working for their patients or their customers because they will have their equipment in a safe, secondary site." The 45-million dollar data center is under construction in Waukee.
Miller says entering the facility will be like something out of a James Bond movie as multi-layered security is one of their primary concerns. "They need to provide their driver’s license, which is scanned in and recorded," Miller says. "They will either have to have their eye scanned to confirm identity, and if they can get through that, they’ll go into a ‘man trap’ so one door can’t open until the second door closes. They’ll be asked to do the same thing again, plus, use their card key to confirm their identity."
Safeguarding medical records is key, as the Iowa Health System serves one of every four patients in Iowa, with 1.8 million patient visits a year. The new TEAM facility will also be the digital warehouse for records on the 19,000 employees of the system, one of Iowa’s largest employers. Miller says all clients will be able to have complete confidence their data will be safeguarded.
Miller says: "All of our customers give us a list of vendors that are allowed access to the building, the hours of access, the level of access. If they come in and request anything other than what our customer has requested, they don’t get past until we have authorization for them to do so." The first phase of the Waukee facility is expected to open in the fall of 2009.