Microsoft 365 (M365) applications have been quietly woven into the fabric of healthcare delivery, supporting everything from clinical communications to administrative processes. Yet many healthcare IT teams underestimate their operational dependency on this ecosystem—and the shared responsibility model that governs its protection. This blind spot creates significant risk in an industry where downtimes can have life or death consequences.
The Invisible Dependency: How M365 Powers Healthcare Operations
When healthcare IT leaders think about critical systems, electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical applications typically top the list.
However, M365 has become the connective tissue that enables these systems to function effectively within the organization. Clinicians coordinate patient care through Microsoft Teams messaging and SharePoint collaboration. Administrative staff manage appointments and billing documentation via Outlook and OneDrive. Telehealth services may rely on Teams for virtual patient consultations, while medical research and quality improvement initiatives leverage Power BI and Excel for data analysis.
In many organizations, a prolonged M365 outage would bring clinical and administrative workflows to a standstill.
But there’s a critical misunderstanding at the heart of every M365 deployment: Microsoft provides an infrastructure with certain security controls, but this doesn't constitute comprehensive data protection. This is known as the “shared responsibility model” and failure to understand its implications can create a vulnerability in any healthcare enterprise.
The M365 shared responsibility model clearly delineates where Microsoft's responsibility ends and yours begins. While Microsoft takes responsibility for infrastructure security and reliability, healthcare organizations remain responsible for data classification, protection, identity management, and (crucially) backup and recovery of M365 data.
This distinction matters tremendously in healthcare. Microsoft offers 99.9% uptime guarantees but doesn't provide guarantees against data loss from ransomware, accidental deletion, or insider threats, all of which are increasing threats to healthcare organizations.
To bridge the gap created by the shared responsibility model, healthcare organizations need to embrace the practice of comprehensive data protection.
Benefits of Comprehensive M365 Data Protection for Healthcare
Rubrik can help you protect your M365 workloads and delivers specific benefits for healthcare organizations that extend far beyond standard IT concerns:
HIPAA Compliance Assurance: Native M365 retention policies may not meet the granular backup and recovery requirements needed for HIPAA compliance. Rubrik's comprehensive protection ensures you can demonstrate due diligence in protecting PHI across the entire M365 environment with immutable backups and detailed audit trails. This allows you to identify sensitive data and PHI throughout your M365 workloads, including the ability to set Microsoft Purview labels.
By identifying this sensitive data you can also determine what has been impacted in the unfortunate event of a cyberattack. This will give you a clear understanding of how to respond to regulators and allow you to proactively mitigate impact by understanding potential points of PHI leakage.
Defense Against Sophisticated Healthcare-Targeted Threats: Healthcare continues to be the #1 target for ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure. Rubrik's zero-trust data security architecture provides immutable backups that ransomware cannot encrypt, creating a reliable path to recovery without paying ransom demands.
Operational Continuity During Critical Care: When patient care is on the line, waiting hours or days for Microsoft's native recovery options isn't viable. Rubrik enables point-in-time recovery of emails, files, and collaboration data in minutes rather than days, ensuring that healthcare operations continue without disruption. With Prioritized Recovery, you can also recover your most recent Microsoft 365 data workloads first to get back to normal operations faster.
Protection Beyond Native Capabilities: In healthcare's high-turnover environment, protecting against both malicious and accidental insider threats is crucial. Rubrik extends protection beyond Microsoft's native tools, providing granular recovery options and comprehensive visibility across your M365 environment.
The Right Approach to M365 Protection in Healthcare
Leading healthcare organizations are increasingly turning to Rubrik to protect their M365 environments because it offers:
Rapid, granular recovery of critical healthcare communications and documents
Air-gapped, immutable backups that can't be compromised by ransomware
Automated compliance reporting to simplify regulatory requirements
Sensitive Data Discovery to identify potential PHI and PII and reduce risk
Seamless integration with existing healthcare IT security frameworks
The reality is simple: comprehensive M365 data protection isn't optional, it's essential infrastructure that supports patient care, protects sensitive information, and ensures operational continuity.
As healthcare cyber threats continue to evolve, organizations that implement robust M365 protection solutions like Rubrik aren't just protecting data, they're protecting their ability to deliver care consistently, confidently, and compliantly in an increasingly digital healthcare ecosystem.
Learn more about M365 protection in Rubrik.