The digitization of healthcare has caused an unrelenting growth trend in unstructured data, with no slowdown in sight. Patient records, lab tests, PACS imaging, and research data are now stored electronically and as the amount of healthcare data continues to skyrocket, so do data vulnerability and security risks. No healthcare organization can afford a data breach or cyber-attack: stealing or encrypting sensitive patient records damages organizations’ reputation and causes huge financial losses, but worse of all, it can halt medical procedures or administration of treatments.
Because of the size and nature of healthcare data–a typical hospital will have over 50 PB of data1, 80% of which is unstructured–traditional backup, retention, and restoration practices and technologies are inefficient and inadequate. Legacy solutions are very slow. It can take hours and you can only backup during the backup windows periods, otherwise, it will impact users and applications accessing the data.
Legacy solutions also cannot handle the scale. This is why many practitioners rely on NAS replication, i.e. taking snapshots of the source and saving them to a secondary NAS. This has become a common method of protection. But this is not a true backup and opens the door to cybercriminals. For primary and secondary NAS placed on the same network with shared credentials, when an attack happens the data and the copies are all vulnerable at once and the snapshots can be encrypted.
While this is the single, major pitfall of NAS replication practice, there is another big downside—storage sprawl. To keep up with the data growth, IT teams continue to buy more hardware and software licenses, resulting in more data copies and data management inefficiencies, along with continuously ballooning IT spending.
Does this sound familiar? Is this the situation in your hospital, clinic, or research center? If so, you should know there is a better way.
Securing Healthcare Data with Rubrik
Rubrik NAS Cloud Direct enables you to balance security and performance to manage petabytes to exabytes of NAS data with billions of files. You can protect all file data stored on any file system under any NAS protocol and write the data to any on-premises NFS or S3-compatible storage target, or directly to any AWS, Azure, or GCP cloud object tier leveraging retention lock to store a safe, immutable copy of the data. This modern, vendor-agnostic solution has been a game-changer for Rubrik customers and has allowed them to mitigate ransomware risk, meet business demands, and make smart backup and archive decisions.
NAS Cloud Direct helps healthcare organizations to:
Increase cyber resilience with immutable, air-gapped backup with separate code base credentials
Simplify and automate protection with a policy-driven engine to ensure NAS data coverage and meet business SLAs.
Achieve scale with high performance by scanning billions of files and moving them in parallel streams with dynamic throttling, without impact on end-user and production environments
Leverage the cost efficiency of the cloud by sending NAS data directly to the cheapest, cold tiers of storage with true incremental forever backups
Have a fast and low friction recovery process with powerful backup data search at the file, directory, export, or system-level and recover to original source or alternate target
Get global visibility and usage across all unstructured data and make the best decisions for archival, backup, and primary storage
Rapidly move data across NAS file infrastructure, on-premises or in the cloud, for storage freedom and reduced TCO
NAS Cloud Direct is a SaaS solution that does not require on-premises hardware and reduces storage and backup costs. With its simple VM-based architecture, you can deploy NAS Cloud Direct within minutes to easily protect patient records, lab tests, PACS imaging, research data, and web BLOB tier of data no matter the size or scale
To learn more about how to protect and manage volumes of unstructured data with NAS Cloud Direct here or schedule a demo or talk to a NAS Cloud Direct specialist.
More ways Rubrik helps:
Simplify Your Epic EHR Protection
Rubrik provides simple, fast, and secure protection for your mission-critical Epic EHR, including Caché/IRIS, Clarity, and Caboodle databases. Automate data protection, replication, and archival workflows to reduce daily management time and prevent data loss with immutable snapshots. Recover faster with visibility into how data changed during an attack and achieve RTO down to minutes.
Reduce sensitive data exposure and facilitate HIPAA compliance
Discover, classify and protect sensitive data without any impact on the production environment. Rubrik Sensitive Data Discovery scans backup snapshots and locates sensitive data in files and applications to help you stay compliant. Document where sensitive data is, and who has access to it, to maintain regulatory requirements. Rubrik’s encryption at-rest and in-flight helps safeguard your sensitive data in support of regulatory compliance.
Protect cloud workloads
Healthcare organizations are increasingly looking to the cloud as an option. Rubrik can protect EHR running in the cloud either as production or disaster recovery with the same policy-based simplicity and security across on-premises and multicloud workloads. As organizations look to SaaS offerings such as Microsoft 365, Rubrik can help by protecting those workloads at scale under the same operational framework.
Learn more about Rubrik for Healthcare here.