Healthcare institutions — whether private or state hospitals and clinics — are special targets for cyberattacks. The sensitive data they handle is a lucrative target for cybercriminals. An attack that disrupts the availability of healthcare services leads to highly critical incidents and should be dealt with immediately. Given the importance of medical services and patient data, a solution able to ensure the availability of healthcare data and the stable functioning of IT systems is a must-have for any hospital.
In this post, we cover the main threats to the sensitive data handled by hospitals and review 7 backup solutions that work for healthcare institutions. Check the pros and cons of every solution and then choose the one that suits your requirements the most.
Common Threats: 5 Reasons Why Hospitals Need Data Backups
The sensitive data that hospitals generate, store, transfer, and process, include:
- Patient Records: Confidentiality and continuous availability of healthcare services entirely depend on the protection of patient records.
- Medical Imaging: For accurate diagnosis and treatment of patient conditions, access to all their MRI data, radiology images, CT scans, and other imaging is essential.
- Laboratory Results: Lab reports must be available to doctors to make the right decisions and provide patients with proper care.
- Administrative Information: Secure and uninterrupted access to administrative data enables timely, accurate, and efficient hospital operations, billing, and staff management.
- Compliance Data: The accuracy, integrity, and privacy of healthcare records are key to maintaining regulatory compliance.
When hit with data loss, hospitals can’t serve patients effectively, lose research progress, fail compliance requirements, and have their administration workflows disrupted. Data loss threats for healthcare institutions include specific dangers to the industry as well as common threats for IT infrastructures across all industries. Understanding these threats can help you choose the right backup solution.
1. Ransomware
Ransomware is a common threat in recent decades to individuals and organizations worldwide. Simply put, ransomware is a type of malware that sneakily infiltrates an IT environment and starts encrypting all the data at reach, paralyzing services and denying access to systems. After that, a message is displayed demanding the payment of a ransom in exchange for decryption keys.
When it comes to healthcare institutions, ransomware is especially dangerous, as any system malfunction at a hospital can endanger the lives of patients. What’s worse, there is no guarantee that data integrity will be maintained and access to systems regained even after paying the ransom.
2. Inefficient Data Management
Hospitals are high-pressure environments, where staff members usually need to deal with multiple tasks simultaneously. Proper data handling is sometimes deprioritized, creating vulnerabilities in security systems.
3. Issues with Third-Party Health Organizations
Data handling and storage policies may vary between healthcare providers, thus leading to vulnerabilities when one organization is compromised. For example, there’s telemedicine, which is on the rise. Hospitals can’t fully control the data integrity and availability measures taken by third parties. Additionally, disclosure of medical information to unauthorized recipients is a serious violation of privacy laws.
4. Poor Security Awareness
Staff members, managers, and patients may not always adhere to basic data security practices, using weak passwords, leaving data unencrypted, clicking online ads, and following links in phishing emails. Therefore, the lack of security awareness can result in vulnerabilities, letting cybercriminals into hospital IT systems and records.
5. Insider Threats
Among all other sources of danger for healthcare data, insider threats are probably the most overlooked. The fact that IT specialists building security systems for hospitals concentrate on countering external breaches makes every malicious insider even more dangerous.
Insiders with knowledge about the system and data repositories have permissions to access systems and know hidden vulnerabilities. These insiders can cause severe data loss incidents before the security team is able to react.
Given the five typical troubles described above and remembering that there are more threats for healthcare organizations, the importance of a dependable backup solution for hospitals becomes evident. No matter how strong a hospital’s security system is, a motivated bad actor can find a vulnerability, disrupt services, and cause data loss and non-compliance.
7 Backup Solutions for a Hospital
To protect a hospital’s data and thus enhance service availability and compliance, here’s a list of 7 backup solutions that offer data redundancy and backup security.
A modern backup solution should enable you to automate backup and recovery workflows, schedule data protection activities, strengthen security and reach tight recovery point objectives (RPO) and short recovery time objectives (RTO).
1. NAKIVO Backup & Replication
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is the first solution on the list. NAKIVO’s solution offers fast backup and reliable recovery as confirmed by reviews from customers on Peer Insights, Capterra, and other review platforms. What’s more important for hospitals with limited IT budgets is the flexible licensing and affordable pricing.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is compatible with various data sources, including machines with hypervisors (VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV), cloud workloads in AWS EC2, physical machines and much more. The targets for storing backups are diverse too, from local storage, NAS, deduplication appliances to public and private clouds like Amazon S3, Wasabi, and others.
The set of functions and features for backup and recovery that you get with NAKIVO Backup & Replication is rich and efficient. With this solution, you can run incremental and full backups, then perform bare-metal restores and full VM restores, thus accommodating the various healthcare data protection requirements and regulations. The backups can be stored in compliant storage offsite.
On the downside, the NAKIVO solution may require some learning effort. However, after you get familiar with the interface and functions, the solution becomes user-friendly, as numerous success stories from hospitals confirm.
2. Druva Data Resiliency Cloud
Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is a cloud-based solution with regular strengths and weaknesses such solutions have. On one hand, Druva’s deployment and management are simple, thus suiting healthcare facilities that don’t have extensive IT qualifications and resources at their disposal. Additionally, the scalability of this solution enables you to adjust it to the needs of your organization, either small or large. Lastly, the set of backup and recovery features include incremental and full backup along with DR options.
As for weaknesses, Druva’s cloud-based nature can make the overall cost a deal-breaker for larger healthcare organizations. Plus to this, as any cloud-based backup solution, Druva Data Resiliency Cloud relies on a stable high-speed internet connection, which is not always the case for hospitals.
3. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a comprehensive data protection solution supporting a wide range of data sources and hypervisors. Combined with advanced features including data deduplication and encryption, this solution can help you build an enhanced backup data protection system.
Regarding the cons, it should be noted that IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is complex. Setting up and managing this solution can pose challenges requiring advanced IT knowledge and experience. Moreover, the extensive feature set comes at a high price, which means that healthcare institutions with limited budgets may find IBM’s offers less attractive.
4. Dell Technologies PowerProtect
The noteworthy advantage of Dell Technologies PowerProtect is the backup and disaster recovery functionalities packed into one solution, simplifying data protection. The extensive feature set with replication, deduplication, and encryption of backup data can help you provide comprehensive data security for data assets.
The negative side, though, is again about complexity and cost. Accessing the advanced feature set of Dell Technologies PowerProtect may require serious investments. Setup and management of those features may need specialized IT resources that hospitals won’t have.
5. Rubrik Zero Trust Data Security
Rubrik Zero Trust Data Security is a solution that you might want to consider when you require a higher data security level. The key feature of Rubrik is that this backup solution is air-gapped, which means that backup copies are isolated from unsecured networks. The set of features that Rubrik provides includes high-end data encryption, deduplication, and replication.
However, getting the full pack of the advanced features and security measures may become a financial burden for a large hospital. Moreover, the IT tech expertise level required to manage Rubrik Zero Trust Data Security is high, while some functions, such as monitoring, may require improvements.
Some online reviews also noted that the UI design of the solution could be more intuitive.
6. Quantum StorNext
Quantum StorNext is a reliable and scalable solution that can suit large businesses, including hospitals and healthcare organizations. The set of features that this solution provides is extensive, significantly boosting data security with data replication and encryption in addition to effective backup and fast recovery.
However, the reliability of Quantum StorNext may not be worth the high cost for budget-dependent healthcare organizations. Moreover, in addition to a significant price, the solution would force a hospital to hire an extensively experienced IT expert and dedicate more hardware resources, increasing the overall price for backups even further.
7. Zerto Virtual Replication
Zerto Virtual Replication is a user-friendly solution that can suit healthcare facilities with different IT expertise levels of staff members. The UI is intuitive enough to simplify management and maintenance, while the available feature set allows us to include the solution in this list. With continuous data protection and built-in disaster recovery functionality, Zerto Virtual Replication can offer enough reliability and meet short RTOs, ensuring the availability of medical services and data.
However, as with many other solutions mentioned above, Zerto Virtual Replication is costly for large hospitals. Given the price of the solution, the feature set should be enriched if Zerto wants to remain in the top-tier list. Lastly, the solution is mainly geared toward the protection of virtualized environments, thus the functionality is limited in physical and hybrid systems.
Conclusion
Hospitals and healthcare organizations require a reliable backup solution to ensure sensitive data protection and stable services in an IT landscape full of threats. The final choice depends on the specific requirements of an organization, the features of the infrastructure to protect, and the available budget. The seven solutions reviewed above are worth considering. You can test yourself and make an informed decision as most are available for free for a trial period.
