[byoung2]

We are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home.

If this is a serious post and there really is a service that monitors cardiac patients from home, first you would have to deal with the unreliability of in-home broadband connections. What if a router needs to be reset, or the DSL goes out? Even if you ignore that, you would expect that any server setup will go down at some time. It has happened to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and now AWS and PlayStation Network. I remember when Rackspace went down a few years back (a truck crashed into the transformer that powered the datacenter - http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/11/13/truck...). All of Armenia was knocked offline when a woman cut a fiber optic line while digging for scrap metal. I'm not sure I'd trust the internet with any kind of life or death monitoring.

[esrauch]

I could be way off base here since I only know what I saw on the site, but it doesn't look like this is life-or-death monitoring. It looks like its long term monitoring for later review by a doctor. It doesn't seem at all likely that they have someone monitoring the incoming data in realtime for heart attacks, that would be far better suited by hooking up the system to dial 911.

I think some IT person was freaking out that they had downtime and slightly exaggerated the life endangering part, they likely just lost information that may have been used in a future diagnostic manner.

[byoung2]

If that is the case, they should have a local copy of that data at the patient's home, which syncs with the remote server periodically. This would protect against internet connection interruptions. In the event that the remote server is unreachable, it should failover to an alternate server in a different location that is reasonably in sync with the failed server.

[dr_]

Seems like it was real time monitoring. Otherwise why not just use the traditional Holter monitor, which is later reviewed by a doctor?

[weaksauce]

Apparently it only has a 24-48 hour limit which lowers the likelihood of finding the super rare event that they are looking for. Still they should have a local cache of a few days that they can sync when amazon gets back up at the very least. Typically though you would want to have a separate datacenter to handle the emergency situations like this though and a smaller local cache for local Internet outages.

[zaidf]

I don't think it's so much about trust as alternatives and best practices. Ideally you should not trust any system when running mission critical apps and always have multiple levels of backups and monitoring including humans on call.