PACS Archive Modernization

Modernize your archive. Without the burden.

Legacy archives are expensive, on-prem, and brittle — refreshed every five years and priced per appliance. Sirona's cloud-native archive is unlimited, secure, and elastic. No infrastructure to provision. No capacity to forecast. Pay per study, not per rack.

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How Sirona is Different

Your archive, without the rack

Legacy PACS archive is a depreciation schedule disguised as software. Every five to seven years, the appliances need replacing. Capacity has to be forecast a quarter ahead, then over-provisioned to be safe. Sirona runs on cloud-native object storage with intelligent tiering — capacity is elastic by definition. There is no rack to refresh, no quote to negotiate, no end-of-life to plan around. The archive scales when your study volume grows; it gets cheaper when studies cool. Your IT team manages access policies, not hardware.

Everything an archive should be in 2026

Sirona's archive is cloud-native by design — not a port, not a hybrid, not a managed appliance. Every capability below ships standard.

Unlimited cloud storage

Backed by AWS S3 with intelligent tiering. Capacity is elastic — no forecasting, no over-provisioning, no overages. Hot studies stay fast; cold studies get cheap automatically.

Explore Archive

DICOMweb-native

Standards-based ingest and retrieval. No proprietary formats, no vendor lock-in. Any DICOM-compliant system can read from or write to your archive.

Explore Standards

Sub-second retrieval

CloudFront edge caching, worklist-driven prefetch, and on-demand frame rendering. Studies open as fast as a hot cache — even when they live in cold storage.

Explore Performance

HIPAA-grade security

Encryption at rest and in transit, role-based access control, and immutable audit logs — backed by an active SOC 2 program and HIPAA controls.

Explore Security

Automated DICOM normalization

Tags are validated and normalized on ingest. No pre-migration scrubbing. No data-quality projects. Inconsistent legacy headers are cleaned automatically as studies stream in.

Explore Ingest

Unified by default

Your archive shares one data model with the viewer, reporter, and worklist. No middleware, no sync jobs — every study, prior, and report accessible from one platform.

Explore Platform

Built to make modernization the easy choice

Four reasons modernizing your archive on Sirona is faster, cheaper, and lower-risk than the path your incumbent is selling.

Migration

Migrate at your pace, not your vendor's

Sirona's overlay-first model removes cutover risk. Standard DICOMweb integrations route new studies to both systems while historical priors stream over in the background. Parallel-run validation confirms every study before you flip routing. Radiologists never stop reading.

Run Sirona in parallel with legacy PACS via DICOMweb

Historical priors transfer in the background — no reading downtime

Automated tag normalization on ingest — no pre-migration scrubs

Phased cutover with per-study integrity validation

Economics

Trade CapEx for clarity

Cloud-native economics replace the lumpy, front-loaded cost of legacy archive. No upfront infrastructure. No five-year refresh. No capacity overages. A predictable per-study subscription that gets cheaper as studies cool — typically well below legacy enterprise PACS at comparable volumes.

$0 upfront infrastructure — no CapEx to start

Per-study pricing — costs scale with volume, not vendors

S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves cold studies to cheaper storage automatically

No refresh cycles, no licensing true-ups, no surprise CapEx

Performance

Cold storage shouldn't feel cold

A modern archive should never make radiologists wait. CloudFront edge caching keeps frequently accessed frames close to the reader. Worklist-driven prefetch loads priors before the study opens. Sub-second open times — even for studies sitting in the cheapest tier.

Global edge caching via CloudFront CDN

Worklist-driven prefetch loads priors before they're needed

On-demand frame rendering — multi-frame studies stream losslessly

Sub-second study open times across hot and cold tiers

Resilience

Built to outlive your data center

Patient images need to survive longer than any single appliance, region, or vendor. Sirona's archive runs on durable AWS S3 storage with HIPAA-compliant encryption, immutable audit logs, and DICOMweb portability — so your data is protected, auditable, and never trapped.

AWS S3 durability (11 nines) with multi-AZ high availability

Encryption at rest and in transit; key management on customer terms

Immutable audit logs — every access traced and tamper-evident

DICOMweb portability — your data is yours, in a standard format

The economics of a modern archive

Lower

per-study cost than legacy enterprise PACS

$0

upfront infrastructure cost

Weeks

to go live with the overlay model

Practices that modernized on Sirona

“We expected an archive migration to be a year-long project. Sirona ran it in parallel with our legacy PACS for a month, validated every study, and then we flipped the switch. Our radiologists never noticed the cutover — and that was the point.”

Sirona Customer

Practice Administrator

“The economics were the deciding factor. We were staring down a refresh cycle and a six-figure capacity expansion. Sirona's per-study pricing eliminated both. We pay for what we read, the cost goes down as studies cool, and there's no infrastructure on our balance sheet.”

Sirona Customer

VP of IT

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FAQs

How is Sirona's cloud archive different from a VNA?

A traditional VNA sits between multiple PACS systems and tries to normalize data across them. Sirona is a unified platform — archive, viewer, reporter, and worklist share one data model. You can still ingest from multi-vendor sources via standard DICOMweb, but the archive isn't a separate orchestration layer. It's the same store the rest of the platform reads from, which removes a class of integration and sync problems VNAs are built to solve.

Can we keep our existing PACS during migration?

Yes — that's the recommended path. Sirona runs in parallel with your legacy PACS via standard DICOMweb. New studies route to both systems while historical priors stream over in the background. Once parallel-run validation confirms every study matches, you flip the routing and decommission the legacy system on your timeline. Radiologists keep reading throughout.

What does pricing look like at our study volume?

Sirona uses a per-study subscription with no upfront infrastructure cost. Pricing typically lands well below legacy enterprise PACS on a per-study basis, with S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically reducing storage cost as studies move from hot to cold tiers. We size every quote against your actual study mix and historical archive size — there are no surprise capacity charges.

How long does a typical archive migration take?

Most overlay deployments go live in a matter of weeks — DICOM connections, worklist configuration, training, and parallel-run setup. Full archive cutovers depend on the size of your historical archive and your validation cadence, but Sirona drives the project end-to-end. Your radiologists never stop reading. Your IT team participates in decisions; we handle execution.

Is patient image data safe in the cloud?

Sirona is HIPAA-compliant and runs an active SOC 2 program. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit, access is governed by role-based controls, and every read or write is captured in immutable audit logs. Storage runs on durable AWS S3 — eleven nines of object durability with multi-AZ high availability. Most practices find Sirona's posture stronger than what an on-prem archive can sustain.

What happens if we ever want to leave?

Your data is yours, stored in standard DICOM and exposed via DICOMweb. There's no proprietary container, no vendor-specific extension required to retrieve studies. If you ever migrate off Sirona, you can stream every study back out via the same standards-based interfaces it came in on. Modernization shouldn't trade one form of lock-in for another.