Every HIPAA-compliant business needs a robust and reliable data backup and recovery service. How secure is yours? Read on to find helpful tips!
Every HIPAA-compliant business needs a robust and reliable data backup and recovery solution. The healthcare industry is responsible for housing some of our most private and sensitive information and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act mandates all covered entities to handle and store this information securely, safely, and effectively.
To ensure all protected health information (PHI) is recoverable in the event of a cyber attack or other disaster.
The inability to access data is a serious issue in healthcare. Even small practices are sitting on large databases of patient healthcare and business information – and that data is an attractive target for cyber criminals.
Data backup and recovery is the process of ensuring that your important data stays protected in case of a disaster, or a computer failure occurs. It’s a vital part of any sensible disaster recovery plan.
As such, organizations constantly face the possibility of data breaches and cyber attacks that can make it impossible for clinicians to access the data they need to treat patients.
Add to this the risks of natural disasters, system failures and human error, and it becomes clear that it’s not a question of if data backup and recovery services will be needed, but when that need will arise.
Let’s consider the many threats HIPAA-compliant businesses face and how deploying a remote data backup and recovery solution will ensure that they are prepared to restore their data (and their business) in any disaster recovery scenario.
Data breaches and ransomware attacks targeting the healthcare industry are on the rise. In fact, since mid-2019, the number of such attacks has been rising dramatically.
Ransomware attacks increased by a whopping 350% during the last quarter of 2019, according to a recent report from Corvus, which also predicted that the rapid pace of assaults would continue throughout 2020.
(Image source: corvusinsurance.com)
Taking all types of data breach into account, the 2019 Healthcare Data Breach Report reveals that breaches involving the exposure of five hundred or more patient records jumped from 371 cases in 2018 to 510 in 2019 (a 37.4% increase), with the total number of patient records exposed shooting up from 13.9 million to 41.3 million over the same period.
(Image source: hipaajournal.com)
Aside from the growing cyber attack landscape, there are many other ways in which a HIPAA-compliant business can experience critical data loss.
For starters, there are natural disasters. Rain, flooding, fire, earthquakes – all can cause damage to internal systems, rendering any PHI and critical data stored on-site completely unrecoverable.
Then there are system failures and hardware failures. Let’s face a simple fact here – computers crash. They just do. And when they crash, what happens to the business data that’s stored on them – is it lost forever? Or is it recoverable? HIPAA compliance means you need to answer “no” to the first question and “yes” to the second.
This is not optional.
As the legislation clearly states, all HIPAA-compliant businesses must “Establish and implement procedures to create and maintain retrievable exact copies of electronic Protected Health Information” (CFR 164.308(7)(ii)(A)).
In addition, a disaster recovery solution and plan are also required to “restore any loss of data” (CFR 164.308(7)(ii)(B)) in the event of a breach, system outage, or damage to computers/servers where PHI is stored.
Finally, there’s the human element to contend with.
Though cyberattacks, natural disasters and system failures are likely to be your most top-of-mind concerns, the truth is that you and your employees pose the greatest threat to your business in terms of data loss and security breaches
In fact, a massive 90% of data breaches are caused by human errors, such as employees failing to spot a phishing email and clicking on a malicious link, or otherwise not using adequate security on their personal devices, accidentally deleting files, or simply spilling a cup of coffee on a computer.
All can cause data dilemmas that can lead to HIPAA violations – meaning a robust data recovery plan & disaster recovery solution is crucial to protect against all scenarios.
Every HIPAA-compliant business needs a reliable data backup recovery solution in place, for the simple reason that, be it cyberattack, natural disaster, system outage, or human error, a catastrophe will happen eventually.
As such, backup solutions need to be put in place now, so you know you can always protect and recover your data– for it will be too late once an incident has already taken place.
To be clear, data backup is the process of making copies of your business data and storing them in a separate location or locations so, no matter what happens on-site, it always exists somewhere else ensuring business continuity
Data recovery services or disaster recovery Services are the process of retrieving that backed up data so it can be restored in full to get you back up and running with minimum business systems disruption.
In practice, this means backing up your data to the cloud, utilizing the specialized services of a HIPAA-compliant data backup and recovery service provider.
Central Data Storage is the disaster recovery solutions provider you’ve been looking for.
UnisonBDR is our purpose-build backup and recovery solution which offers a fully supported, encrypted, cloud-based and HIPAA-compliant data backup and recovery solution designed specifically for SMBs in highly regulated industries. We exist to help HIPAA-compliant businesses survive all their data disasters situations.
Not only does our solution automate your data backups (meaning you never have to think – let alone worry – about your data backups being performed in full compliance with HIPAA requirements), it also provides 448-bit end-to-end encryption.
This exceeds military-grade standards to ensure your data remains protected from all cyberthreats – both in transit and at rest in our highly-secure private cloud services.
What’s more, with unlimited storage capacity, dual authentication and ransomware recovery, UnisonBDR ensures that your data is always safe, fully protected, and recoverable – no matter what
Want to learn more about the benefits of UnisonBDR for backup and recovery? Just call 1-888-907-1227 or email info@centraldatastorage.com.
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