Over recent times, we’ve seen healthcare organizations increasingly targeted by cyber-criminals. The problem has dominated news headlines, detailing how hospitals nationwide have fallen victim to these cyber-attacks. By 2023, more than 100 million individuals have been impacted by healthcare-focused cyberattacks. Highly valued and sensitive data, such as patient histories, insurance records, and provider accounts, were primary targets of such attacks. Hospitals lacking a robust business continuity strategy and cloud data backups were left with no choice but to cancel crucial appointments, surgeries, or shift critical care patients to neighboring facilities.
Protecting patient data and ensuring seamless hospital operations require the development of a provider-specific plan. Such a plan deters malicious threat actors while enhancing everyday efficiency, operations, and reliability, all without overspending on cloud services. There are alternative cloud providers, like OVHcloud US, offering multiple solutions that address the significant challenges facing healthcare providers and hospitals, from data redundancy to patient data protection and automation for data management.
To safeguard against potential threats, whether from cybercriminals, natural disasters, or power outages, a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is paramount. These solutions let providers create full versions of system applications and set recovery points to ensure consistent data backups. Most cloud service providers advocate for following the ‘3-2-1’ rule: three copies of data, two backup sources, and at least one backup stored at a different physical location.
Allocating data backups across multiple locations leads to faster recovery times, shields providers from unplanned downtime and data loss, and reduces unforeseen costs during a recovery scenario. Swift access to data is critical in emergency patient situations, and can greatly impact the outcomes. Upon data recovery, healthcare providers can retrieve patient data using a journaling system that catalogs file type, date, and other details. This allows providers to identify the most recently saved and restored patient records.
Hospitals and healthcare organizations necessitate robust and highly redundant solutions for maintaining effortless accessibility and security of patient data. A unique environment established via Private Cloud integrates the advantages of cloud computing with robust safety and complete command of the IT infrastructure. Private Cloud solutions offer enhanced storage capabilities and swift response times, facilitating efficient management of forms applications like electronic health records, providing quicker access to data for effective patient handling. This approach also includes resilience features to handle potential application degradation, ensuring high-performance cloud services are maintained even under strain.
Solutions such as VMware can be valuable to healthcare institutions by automating the process of enhancing their patient data storage capacity. VMware vSAN, for instance, offers a fast and efficient infrastructure that meets the performance, availability, security, and scalability demands of modern healthcare establishments while adhering to standards like HIPAA and PCI DSS. For healthcare providers, it’s crucial to streamline their infrastructure and establish a seamless environment that reduces liabilities, systematizes data across high-transaction apps, lowers costs, and enhances efficiency.
Healthcare institutions have become a prime target for malfeasance. Elements like vSAN reinforce the infrastructure with multiple redundancies and adaptive storage features to curtail downtime and data loss during an attack. This solution also allows for easy accessibility and duplication of patient data, facilitating a more adaptable work environment. Additionally, this setup enhances data transfer efficacy for systems like EHR and EMR, mobile apps, medical imaging, among others.
Swift retrieval of patient medical records and medical imaging results is essential when admitting a patient through the emergency room. High-performance object storage solutions enable providers to swiftly access patient media files, resulting in more effective treatment.Outcomes. Such storage solutions are ideal for housing MRIs, CT scans, X-rays, video imagery etc. In non-emergency situations where medical history access is needed, solutions akin to S3 Object Storage suit medical record archival purposes. Regulatory laws often mandate healthcare providers to retain patient data for specified durations. In such a context, S3 Object Storage allows secure retention and retrieval of enormous quantities of data without hampering everyday performance.
Healthcare providers today have to manage a staggering amount of data, from inputting new patient information to retrieving old ones during patient visits. The costs associated with data ingress and egress can be daunting for those using cloud storage, particularly with most major cloud providers where unexpected monthly data movement fees can induce “sticker shock”. Alternative cloud providers such as OVHcloud US, however, offer a refreshing difference with predictable, transparent and budget-friendly monthly cloud pricing. This is pivotal for healthcare providers whose primary objective is patient care and saving lives.
With the right cloud provider, customers have the capability to effortlessly regulate their network and oversee their data protection via an easy-to-use portal. Dependable, transparent, and economical cloud services are indispensable as healthcare providers continually find themselves to be prime targets for malicious actors. With an assortment of budget-friendly solutions, alternative cloud providers are poised to lend a hand to providers in safeguarding theirs and their patients’ data.
