As a healthcare company, your patients are your number one priority. Part of your obligation to them is to keep their health-related information protected.

Unfortunately, PHI has become very attractive to cyber criminals and the industry has been hit hard recently by attacks. Entire systems can fall victim to ransomware, locking healthcare providers out of important patient data. The companies affected are paying huge sums to recover. 

A False Sense of Security
While you may be taking some precautions, such as securing and backing up your sensitive data, sometimes that’s not enough. There is a common misconception that data is safe if backed up once a day, but this outdated practice is no longer sufficient for several reasons:

• If you forget to perform the backup or the backup process fails, you’re not protected.
• If you only back up your files once a day, you’re left vulnerable to the loss of an entire day’s work.
• If you don’t properly validate your backup files, you could be in for an unpleasant surprise when you actually try to use those files to restore your company’s operations.
• If you only back up your files on-site, you could lose them too – leaving you with no way to meet client requests. 

The Better Way: Business Continuity
Business continuity describes a complete solution for backup and disaster recovery. A true business continuity solution will protect data on-premises and in the cloud. Whether data is on servers or in SaaS applications, it needs to be backed up. Business continuity goes a step further and offers you the ability to restore your data, which we call disaster recovery.

If your practices is ever faced with ransomware, a strong solution will have you up and running in minutes. Solutions that leverage the hybrid cloud can guarantee a quicker restore time as well.  

Why? Local backups are great to keep data stored on local devices, but if something happens to that device, then what? A hybrid cloud backup solution takes an initial backup on a local device and then replicates the backup to a cloud server. Cloud-only solutions are not as reliable on their own due to bandwidth issues. A hybrid model works to alleviate the vulnerabilities by implementing both processes to fill in the gaps.