Health Sector: Is It More Vulnerable to Data Protection Challenges?
On the unfortunate morning of 12th May 2017, nobody at the UK’s prestigious National Health Service (NHS) knew that they are about to witness the most menacing cyber attack in the history of the healthcare institution. Through a mere Microsoft Window’s vulnerability, the attacker was able to infect approximately 200,000 computers and nearly 16 health centres, causing the cancellation of over 19,000 appointments. Termed ‘WannaCry’, the attack cost the NHS GBP £20 million in cancelled appointments and nearly GBP £72 million in data recovery and up-gradation of security apparatus.
Unfortunately, the healthcare industry, especially during and post-Covid-19 scenario, has been the most sensitive and vulnerable sector to cyber attacks compared to others. As per an independent research survey of more than 3,000 respondents, out of which 399 were from the healthcare industry, healthcare providers are likely to increase their data protection and cybersecurity budget by 4.9 per cent worldwide in 2022. Perhaps the most fundamental question here is why hospitals and other human service centres continue to top the hit list of cybercriminals? And the answer is profoundly precise and concise: This industry is underprepared to deal with the highly active and innovative cyber attack tactics.
The leading reason is the lack of cybersecurity training and education among hospital staff. Staff negligence could bring the entire facility to its knees. Little did an employee of the Montpellier University Medical Centre know that his interaction with a phishing email would end up sabotaging over 600 computers. Secondly, though an increasing number of healthcare organisations are realising the vitality of robust data protection mechanisms, many others are aware of the gravity of the situation.
In simple words, the healthcare sector needs to gear up investments in fortifying its cybersecurity walls by securing infrastructure, updating systems and eliminating vulnerabilities. Moreover, due to digital transformation, remote work has become a new norm in the human services industry as medical practitioners often prefer to conduct health-related operations and consultations online.
Considering the above-mentioned elements, it is of paramount importance for health providers to secure the services of a reliable and industry-leading data protection platform like Veeam to keep the cybercriminals and bad actors at bay. Since 2019, Veeam’s Modern Data Protection platform has been leading the market for its cyber resiliency and data protection capabilities.
Whether physical or online, on-premises or in the cloud, Veeam specialises in managing data in multiple ways, specialising in modern backup and replication capabilities. Veeam’s infrastructure flexibility allows organisations to protect their data and business-critical operations regardless of the storage environment. Provided health-related operations continue to evolve and increase, Veeam is capable enough to scale up as per the needs of the health organisations.
To combat ransomware, Veeam highly emphasises that at least one copy of data should be air-gapped or immutable, ensuring an additional layer of security through physical and network isolation of data. Veeam’s end-to-end encryption and digital hygiene practices, comprised of patch management, multi-factor authentication, password management and much more, can assist healthcare institutions in identifying, responding and terminating existing or imminent threats.
With Veeam, organisations can instantaneously recover physical and virtual workloads from anywhere, recover enterprise-pivotal applications, or even roll back their entire Network Attached Storage to a pre-infected state. Last but not least: The total cost of shielding data is considerably minimised, as Veeam’s Modern Data Protection is scalable, deployable and possesses an efficient deduplication mechanism.
Click on the following link to find out how Veeam can enable large-scale and fully automated disaster recovery, highly secure and undestroyable backups, an immensely cost-effective data protection model, and more for your business.
