Despite great efforts and regulations, the healthcare industry remains the most vulnerable to data breaches, affecting millions of peoples’ privacy and costing millions in fines. According to a report by Ponemon, the cost of a data breach for healthcare organizations rose to $408 per record in 2018, with the healthcare industry incurring the highest cost for data breaches compared to any other industry.
With hackers and ransomware now attacking backup storage files as well as primary data, having an elaborate backup and recovery plans with the most stringent security is crucial for today’s organizations.
In this blog, we lay out best practices for backup and recovery, and detail the type of backup that provides a secure means of protecting health care data.
Best Practices for Backup
Automate Your Backup
Have you ever forgotten to run your backup system? Or, is it too much of a hassle to keep doing it every day? Meanwhile, there is always a danger of forgetting a file or two, or just being careless and skipping backup some week. Scheduling automated backups eliminates the need to remember to manually backup, saves money and time, and makes backup versioning hassle-free.
Password Protect Your Backup
Protecting your backup with a password should be the minimum level of security considered. While passwords aren’t foolproof and can be cracked with special tools, they alert professionals of unauthorized access and help prevent data disasters.
Encrypt Your Backup
Encryption protects data making it unreadable, and accessible only through an encryption key. Regulations such as HIPAA mandate encryption, so it is not just a great idea, but a requirement as well.
Test Backups Regularly
Most organizations test backup only once a year – if that. Best practice is to test backups far more often — at least once a quarter, and whenever there is a change made to backup hardware or software. This is the only way to fully ensure backups are recoverable. Automated testing provides consistency and data validity, reduces the burden on staff, and leaves little room for error.
Backup Composed of Multiple Elements
Businesses typically have two main choices of backup – onsite and remote. With on-site backup, you can store your data on-premises. This allows for quicker access to the stored data without requiring a strong internet connection.
With remote backup systems like the cloud, the backup is stored at a different location – ideal for disaster recovery. Remote backup ensures that your data is safe and protected against all potential risks.
However, a combination of onsite and cloud backup, also known as hybrid cloud backup, is the most secure way to protect data.
Hybrid Cloud Backup
The hybrid cloud backup process involves a local backup and a replicated backup offsite in the cloud providing security and added insurance. You keep the data in-house protected with a firewall and encryption, that can be accessed quickly. Also, you can send this encrypted data to the cloud, keeping the extra data copy off-site. While recovering, this data can be recalled from the cloud into the on-site storage on demand, and restored from there.
In case of an actual disaster like fire or earthquakes, you won’t lose your data since it’s on the cloud. And in the case of a hack, the off-site data in the cloud is always secure.
Other hybrid cloud benefits
- Scalability: In a traditional on-site backup environment, outgrowing your server requires you to buy, install, and manage new hardware. In a cloud scenario, organizations can scale up when needed.
- Optimized Budget: As cloud offers more flexible pricing than traditional environments do, hybrid cloud backup and recovery is less expensive than two physical layers of backup.
- HIPAA/HITECH Compliance Made Easy: Healthcare organizations face compliance regulations like HIPAA/HITECH, requiring data to be backed up in a secure manner, and available for easy recovery. A good hybrid cloud backup solution provides security measures through strong encryption algorithms, enabling you to meet both your business continuity needs and compliance requirements.
Kaseya Unified Backup
Kaseya Unified Backup (KUB), an add-on to VSA by Kaseya, brings together ransomware protection, cloud-based storage, and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) services in a powerful, all-in-one appliance and cloud-based platform providing high-quality protection. It inspects every file during each backup for ransomware infections to ensure “clean” instant recoveries are always at your fingertips.
Healthcare organizations can expect reduced downtime with instant recovery, ransomware detection, and automated disaster recovery testing with Kaseya Unified Backup.
To schedule a demo of Kaseya Unified Backup, click here.
