Expanding Healthcare Institutions through Intelligent Data Backup Methods
In today's digital age, the importance of a robust disaster recovery strategy cannot be overstated, especially for healthcare organisations that handle sensitive data subject to strict regulations like HIPAA. This article is part of HealthTech's MonITor blog series, focusing on the common obstacles healthcare organisations face when adopting a cloud-delivered backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategy, and the best practices to overcome them.
### Common Obstacles
One of the main challenges is managing data security and compliance risks. Healthcare data, particularly Protected Health Information (PHI), is highly sensitive and requires stringent protection. Common issues include misconfigured cloud storage, insufficient encryption, weak key management, lack of immutable audit logs, and overly broad access permissions. These vulnerabilities have led to massive data breaches, exposing millions of patient records [1][2][3].
Another obstacle is the complexity and expertise gaps in designing and maintaining a cloud DR solution. Healthcare organisations often lack the internal expertise required, which complicates implementation, testing, maintenance, and integration with legacy systems [3][5].
Legacy system integration is another significant hurdle. Healthcare systems often rely on legacy applications that don't easily connect with cloud environments, necessitating middleware or phased migration to ensure continuity [3][5].
Staff resistance and change management are also common challenges. Healthcare professionals may resist workflow changes introduced by cloud adoption. Lack of training or communication can delay or reduce adoption effectiveness [3].
Cost management is another concern. Unexpected costs from cloud migration and DR operations, including ongoing subscription fees and data transfer costs, require thorough forecasting and governance to avoid budget overruns [3][4].
Operational disruption and downtime during migration or failover events also pose risks [3].
### Best Practices
To address these obstacles, healthcare organisations can implement robust security controls, such as end-to-end encryption, strict access controls, compliance with healthcare regulations, immutable audit logs, and Business Associate Agreements (BAA) [1][2][3][5].
Comprehensive risk management and incident response plans are crucial, including formal incident response and breach recovery plans, routine tabletop exercises, and regular assessments of security posture and compliance requirements [1].
Stakeholders should be engaged early and provided with training. This includes involving clinical and IT staff from the planning phases, identifying clinical champions to promote adoption, and delivering thorough training on new systems and workflows [3].
Expertise and managed services can also be leveraged to design, implement, test, and maintain cloud DR solutions [5].
Extensive planning and testing are essential to minimise downtime. This includes developing detailed migration and failover plans, scheduling transitions during off-hours, and running parallel operations when possible [3][5].
Cost control and monitoring are also vital. This includes conducting detailed cost modeling before migration, continuously monitoring and optimising resource use, and instituting governance policies for cloud resource provisioning [3][4].
By addressing these obstacles through careful planning, robust security, stakeholder engagement, and expert support, healthcare organisations can effectively adopt cloud-delivered backup and disaster recovery strategies that protect sensitive data while maintaining compliance and operational continuity.
Many healthcare organisations currently use on-premises solutions for backup and disaster recovery. A hybrid cloud solution can simplify and improve the management of cloud-based data for these organisations. A crawl, walk, run strategy is commonly used for implementing a cloud-based backup and recovery strategy, starting with hybrid tools and progressing to cloud-native tools.
IT teams need to know how Tier 1 apps will be backed up to the cloud and how they will react in a disaster recovery situation. Healthcare organisations have more Tier 1 applications (patient- and clinician-facing applications) than Tier 2, 3, or 4 applications (those focused on supporting the business).
A trusted partner like CDW can help organisations transition their backup and disaster recovery workloads to the cloud, offering expertise with hybrid infrastructure and cloud-native solutions. Leveraging the cloud for backup and disaster recovery is faster and more efficient than using tape or offsite storage facilities.
IT leadership should approach a cloud-based strategy with business goals in mind and work backward to create the strategy and tactical efforts to achieve these goals. Transitioning to a cloud-native tool for backup directly to the cloud is a next step for healthcare organisations.
CDW provides managed services to help organisations monitor and maintain backups, from moving them from on-premises to a hybrid infrastructure or cloud-native solution. Non-clinical workloads like backup and recovery are often among the first workloads that healthcare organisations move to the cloud.
Before moving backups to the cloud, IT decision-makers should understand what is being backed up, end to end, and how often backups will occur. Moving critical clinical applications to the cloud can be done after healthcare organisations have learned to work in a cloud environment without impacting patient care.
Healthcare organisations face challenges such as cyberthreats, IT staff shortages, and financial concerns. Cloud-based solutions are attractive for healthcare organisations due to their lack of need for physical space, power, and cooling. By adopting a well-planned cloud-delivered backup and disaster recovery strategy, healthcare organisations can tackle these challenges and ensure the continuity of their critical operations.
Science and technology play a crucial role in modernizing disaster recovery strategies for healthcare organizations, especially in the implementation of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions. Artificial Intelligence, for instance, can be leveraged to enhance data security, manage risk, and optimize resource use.
Health-and-wellness organizations, on the other hand, can benefit significantly from data-and-cloud-computing technologies, as they provide a more efficient and cost-effective approach to managing sensitive data, maintaining compliance, and ensuring operational continuity.
