Webinar Key Takeaways - Responding to Ransomware with AWS Backup and DR
Healthcare Triangle
Aug 20, 2021
Ransomware attacks have proven to be one of the most destructive cyber threats for healthcare organizations, driving financial and legal strain and disrupting their care delivery processes and quality. In the face of high-profile cyberattacks on healthcare organizations, Joe Grinstead, Vice President - Technology at Healthcare Triangle Inc, and Roman Schwartz, DR Expert at AWS, presented the latest webinar, “Responding to Ransomware with AWS Backup and DR”.
The webinar covered how cloud-based disaster recovery can provide better reliability, availability, and security than on-premises secondary data centers without requiring duplicate hardware, networking, and software. It also provided insights on how security leaders can help their organizations gain ransom resilience fast.
What is Ransomware?
Ransomware is malicious code designed to gain unauthorized access to systems and data and encrypt that data to block access by legitimate users. In 2020 cyberattacks on healthcare grew by 55%. According to Data Breach QuickView Report, healthcare data breaches are the most common threat to date in 2021.
Ransomware – Prevention and Response
When it comes to ransomware, organizations are doing a great job in preventive measures – assessment, test emails, and setting multi-factor authentication to prevent ransomware. But, when we look at how healthcare organizations respond to a ransomware event, they fall short. One of the key areas they fall short of having an infrastructure that they can recover to after the attack. Ransomware attacks go all over IT infrastructure - servers, storage, and networks. In response to the attack, organizations need to figure out how to clean up things and get back to normal operations.
The webinar highlighted how backup and disaster recovery on AWS become a toolset for healthcare organizations to respond better and faster after ransomware attacks.
How is Disaster Recovery Different from Backup?
| Disaster Recovery | Data Backup |
|---|---|
| Recovers operational workloads | Only protects data |
| Faster FULL SERVER recovery | Slower recovery |
| Change-based replication | Can lose hours or days of data |
| File level recovery & longer-term retention |
Why is Disaster Recovery Important?
1. Patient safety and continuity of care
2. Uptime and regulatory requirements (compliance)
3. Security/ransomware concerns
4. Outages, data corruption
5. Trust and reliability
Why is Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Important?
As ransomware attacks become more targeted, security leaders must understand and counter new ransomware challenges and make their healthcare organization HIPAA compliant to reduce the potential impact from all threats.
Organizations have fallen short in protecting their IT environment with traditional (non-cloud) disaster recovery solutions. Increasingly, healthcare organizations are shifting away from traditional disaster recovery to reap the benefits of leveraging cloud-based solutions:
- Infrastructure layer security covered by AWS
- 80% cost savings vs. traditional DR
- Easy and repeatable testing without shutting down production
- Recover in minutes
- Workload based resources are customizable and elastic
- Trust and reliability
- Continuous data protection
- Improved performance and scale
- Pay-as-you go model
CloudEndure Disaster Recovery
CloudEndure is a disaster recovery tool offered by AWS. AWS targets anything from on-premises workload to cross-region in AWS to cross-cloud. This highly resilient tool can be leveraged for all disasterrecovery needs. CloudEndure Disaster Recovery enables healthcare organizations to shift their disaster recovery strategy quickly and efficiently to AWS from existing physical or virtual data centers, private cloud, or other public clouds. AWS disaster recovery relies on three pillars: flexibility, trustworthiness, and automation.
Disaster Recovery Lifecycle
Healthcare Triangle’s Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions
- Use CloudEndure for all the orchestration of data synchronization
- Create scalable and isolated virtual private clouds (VPCs)
- Immutable storage and unaltered backups
- Non-disruptive, low-effort migration
- Cost-effective purchase model with pay-as-you-go pricing
- Air gapped backups
- Minimal upfront capital investments
- Scalability and security
- Reduced datacenter infrastructure footprint and archiving services contracts
- Streamlined backup processes, reduced manual effort, predictable retrieval times
Reasons HCTI chose to build on AWS include:
- Scalability or unlimited capacity
- Diversity of regions
- Capability or expertise AWS brings in
By leveraging cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions, healthcare organizations can continue to operate and provide patient care even during a ransomware attack or other events that may disrupt on-premises systems or their primary data centers - without breaching HIPAA standards.
An Iowa health system trusted Healthcare Triangle to implement backup and DR solutions using the scalable and reliableAWS platform to recover from potential cyberattacks or in the case of a failure in their primary, on-premises, infrastructure. We reduced their costs by 30% and provided them with up-front and annual tests.
Now it’s time to assess your situation and improve your readiness.
Drop an email to info@healthcaretriangle.com or schedule a consultation.