The eClinicalWorks Cloud Powered by Microsoft Azure

Failover/Disaster Recovery Overview

Each primary data center for clients hosted by Azure has a failover site, also an Azure environment. If services in the primary data center are unavailable, the service ‘fails over’ to the designated back up site. Maintaining multiple regions ensures that customers are provided with redundancy in hosting services.

  • Regions: Each region features data centers that are deployed within a latency-defined perimeter. Each data center is connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network. This design ensures that services within any region offer the best possible performance and security.
  • Availability Zones: Availability zones are physically separate locations within each region that are tolerant to local failures which can range from software and hardware failures to events such as earthquakes, floods, and fires. Tolerance to failures is achieved by geographic redundancy and logical isolation of services. To ensure resiliency, a minimum of three (3) separate availability zones are present in all availability zone-enabled regions.Availability zones are connected by a high-performance network with a round-trip latency of less than 2 milliseconds (ms). This allows data to remain synchronized and accessible in the event of a failure in any individual component. Each Azure zone is composed of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and network infrastructure.
    Availability zones are designed so that if one zone is negatively impacted, regional services, capacity, and high availability are supported by the remaining two zones.
Infographic depicting an Azure Region with three Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone contains one or more data centers, and they are interconnected with diverse fiber paths. The zones are labeled as Availability Zone 1, Availability Zone 2, and Availability Zone 3.

Figure 1- Azure Availability Zones

Zone Redundancy

eClinicalWorks uses Azure Zone redundancy architecture*. If data from the primary zone becomes unavailable, failover ensures the practice’s eClinicalWorks data is available on two zones within the same region, typically within 15 to 30 minutes. When the original zone is restored, the services are switched back to the primary data center seamlessly.

Regional Backup

More broadly, Azure offers failover between regions. So, in the unlikely event of a disaster in a region, practice data will be recovered in another region, typically within 24 to 72 hours.

Diagram titled 'Availability Zones' illustrating protection from entire data center failures within Region 1. The diagram shows three circles labeled Availability Zone 1, Availability Zone 2, and Availability Zone 3, each containing icons representing data centers. The image notes protection from fire, power and cooling disruptions, and floods.

Figure 2 – Azure Regional Availability Zones*

*In regions where Azure supports zone redundancy, eCW deploys using the method.