Flood-stricken doctors probe cloud back-up

"This will be a time that will test the disaster recovery and business continuity planning of many general practices," said Professor Claire Jackson, RACGP President and GP in Brisbane.

Practice can be relieved of computing

"If a practice can be relieved of computing and back-ups complexity, I think many would jump at the possibility to have a simple cloud-based solution," he said.

"The College is working around standards for businesses around cloud-based computing. Broadly speaking they don't gladly exist. We have a lot of disparate data-based systems provided by a lot of different vendors with a lot of different standards in different database solutions. So for the average practice to sign up to a cloud-based data storage system - at this stage that’s not available."

The straightway step for the College

He said the straightway step for the College was to explore how such individual solutions for cloud-based computing operate and scale them so they are more broadly available.