Following our previous discussion on the hidden risks associated with M365 data protection in healthcare, it's clear that many organizations should take a second look at how they’re prioritizing the recovery and security of their M365 environments. With a 265% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks on Microsoft customers, healthcare organizations require a comprehensive cyber resilience approach.
Rubrik recently announced new features for M365 protection that can help healthcare providers achieve just that.
Build Operational Resilience, Protect Patient Data
In healthcare, system downtime has a direct impact on patient outcomes. Comprehensive cyber resilience ensures critical clinical systems remain operational during attacks with minimal disruption to patient care workflows.
With Rubrik Threat Monitoring, healthcare organizations can proactively identify Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) by continuously scanning M365 recovery points with constantly updated threat intelligence feeds. When combined with Prioritized Recovery features, organizations can restore essential services rapidly, returning business operations to normal in days rather than weeks. This means teams are able to maintain internal communications even in the aftermath of an attack, which is critical to conducting a coordinated response.
Sensitive patient data also requires special safeguards beyond standard security measures. Rubrik Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) can identify data exposure risks before breaches occur, continuously discovering and classifying sensitive patient information across Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive instances. Pairing sensitive data discovery with Rubrik Threat Hunting capabilities allows you to search for specific new or emerging IOCs throughout the entirety of historical M365 backup data in a matter of seconds.
This comprehensive approach supports continued compliance with healthcare regulations—even during recovery—helping organizations demonstrate due diligence in protecting sensitive information with detailed forensic capabilities.
The Sharing Risk You Didn't Know You Had
"Anyone with the link can view" might be the most dangerous phrase in healthcare IT. A single misconfigured sharing setting can expose thousands of patient records to unauthorized access. Consider this real-world scenario: An analyst downloads data including PHI each week, making their reports and charts, and then saves those excel extracts to their home folder. Without proper classification, these documents might be inadvertently shared too broadly or inadequately protected.
Now, you can automatically identify and help remove public and organizational-wide sharing links to sensitive M365 data. For healthcare organizations, this provides a critical safety net against accidental oversharing, a common finding in OCR breach investigations. And with automated auditing and correction of Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels at scale, organizations achieve effortless demonstration of compliance with HIPAA and other mandates.
Such comprehensive visibility into data handling simplifies audit processes while automatic enforcement of data segmentation policies ensures continuous protection of regulated information. This integrated approach provides clear documentation of security measures for regulatory reporting and significantly reduces the risk of compliance-related penalties, allowing healthcare IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than regulatory firefighting.
The People Behind the Data
Healthcare environments involve complex access relationships, from rotating residents to research partners. Rubrik Identity Inventory for M365 provides new levels of visibility into this ecosystem. Security teams can see comprehensive maps of who has access to what sensitive information across their M365 environment.
This visibility enables informed decisions about access controls and highlights potential compliance issues before they become problems. Complementing this visibility, Data Access Governance automatically flags concerning patterns like external collaborators with excessive access to radiology data or former employees whose accounts still maintain connections to billing documentation.
Healthcare professionals need technology that works for them in demanding clinical environments. Self-Service Recovery gives users the power to restore lost emails, files and other M365 content without IT intervention. This reduces frustration from system outages and data loss and minimizes workflow disruptions during security events. The result? Happier, more productive staff.
Empowering Clinicians, Protecting Data
For healthcare organizations, the value of comprehensive M365 cyber resilience goes far beyond technical specifications. Rubrik's unified approach combining Threat Monitoring, Threat Hunting, Self-Service Recovery, DSPM, and Identity Recovery protection delivers the operational stability, patient data protection, regulatory compliance, and financial security needed to fulfill their core mission of providing excellent patient care without disruption.
The stakes are simply too high for healthcare organizations to rely on basic backup strategies alone. With these capabilities for M365, Rubrik is helping healthcare organizations build security and resilience directly into their digital collaboration environments and protect patient trust while enabling the clinical collaboration that delivers excellent care.
Check out a demo and see how these features can transform your healthcare organization's approach to M365 security.