Five Mega Hospital Data Breaches: True Offsite Archiving Can Keep You From Becoming Next.

Offsite Archiving Offers Safeguards

2015 has some alarming statistics in regards to patient records that were compromised due to cybersecurity breaches. Of the eight largest breaches since 2010, five of them occurred last year. Can offsite archiving protect your patient data from hackers?

Healthcare officials report that around 100 million records were breached last year. That number is often associated with another large number – fines handed down due to HIPAA violations. IBM recently offered its “2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index” to give industry professionals a look into the issue and to provide some key steps to developing a cybersecurity program that can help put a halt to the hijacking of patient data, which includes medical imaging.

By some accounts, healthcare organizations have become a top target for cybercriminals. Others include manufacturing, financial services, government and transportation. While China is getting a lot of attention as the source of the hacking, insiders are largely to blame with 60 percent of compromised records being blamed on a person who has access to the healthcare organization’s assets. However, this insider might also be a third party, according to IBM’s report.

While cloud-based archiving was once unheard of in the healthcare industry, times have changed, and so has the technology. For instance, healthcare providers were once quite wary of the prospect of having sensitive patient data stored anywhere but on local, hospital-controlled, managed and maintained servers. Given the amount of data that is being generated on a daily basis, this is becoming less and less cost effective.

Cloud-based archiving vendors today are safeguarding the data they store in such a way that healthcare providers today are making the move to the cloud, and it’s not just the security they’re attracted to – it’s the cost savings, availability and scalability that also attract them to offsite archiving.

The best offsite archiving vendors are utilizing the top level datacenters, which include Level IV centers that provide on-site security as well as multiple redundancies that protect data, even in the event of natural disasters. This provides uptime not usually associated with on-site archiving methods. In fact, the best archiving vendors will guarantee cost savings as well as near-100 percent uptime.

HIPAA requires that two copies of ePHI must exist, which means that if one copy of the ePHI is destroyed in the course of its legal life, another will be available. The best vendors are using more than two datacenters to back up data such as this. The datacenters are located in different geographical locations, which means if a tornado wipes out a datacenter in one location, the information will be safely stored in a location that is far from the threatening storm.

OffSite Image Management, Inc. has all client information stored on multiple servers at Level IV datacenters located in geographically diverse locations. We pledge to protect your organization’s data and ensure that you have immediate access to it at all times. You will also have the ability to maintain normal operations with minimal inconvenience, even in the event of an IT catastrophe. Find out more about our 360-degree solutions by contacting us today.