The security of protected healthcare information (PHI) has long been a tenet within healthcare. Even before HIPAA came out in 1996, healthcare providers recognized the sanctity and privacy of the doctor-patient relationship. In the past, it was easy to protect PHI by simply locking a door to a file room, but in today’s world, PHI is everywhere. Medical devices are creating data, researchers collaborate across the globe, and even patients can add critical information via portals. The world of healthcare has gotten a whole lot bigger and much more complex.
The average healthcare system has anywhere from 200 to 1,000 clinical systems, many of which are interconnected. They have large departments for privacy to ensure appropriate access to records within the EMR but give very little thought to the PHI outside the EMR. Studies have shown that it costs on average $8 per record to properly protect PHI according to HIPAA guidelines. How can you provide this protection if you don’t know where all PHI is located? Oh, and let’s not forget that healthcare has become a favorite target for malicious actors — motivated not just by money, but also by the opportunity to cause chaos and destruction.
So, in this new world of disparate systems and online data, how do you continue to protect our PHI efficiently? As the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 14 years running and providing support for legacy, virtual, cloud, and modern workloads, Veritas is the answer.
With one enterprise solution, you can protect all your workloads and PHI. Veritas can help you determine where critical information is located and who has access to it. Veritas NetBackup and Veritas NetBackup Appliances can protect your data on premises, between premises and even to or from the cloud. NetBackup Appliances were the first to protect backup data from dreaded ransomware attacks, ensuring you could recover regulated data and return to patient care. They do so not with a clumsy air gap solution that is destined to fail but by hardening the appliance with “whitelisting” so that only known, authorized actions can run on it. This approach protects your workloads from ransomware as well as other zero-day vulnerabilities. Plus, our solution is certified by most EMR and clinical system vendors.
Veritas also offers low-cost, high-performance solutions for long-term retention with Veritas Access software or the Veritas Access Appliance, whether you want to use them as a target for NetBackup or as a way to introduce storage tiering to lower costs. For as little as pennies on the gigabyte, Access will let you retain your critical data on-prem. In addition, you can use the optional CloudCatalyst to deduplicate and stream your data to the cloud provider of your choice. Using Access and the Access Appliance together with your organization’s data management plan, you can create a cost-effective solution to retain data based on your specific needs.
Want to know more about the Veritas solutions Zones has to offer? You’re in the right place – just read on.
Rick Bryant is a National Healthcare Architect and ransomware expert at Veritas Technologies LLC.