In the past few weeks, we have witnessed numerous cybersecurity attacks against our country. Industries such as transportation, pipelines, government, and even beef production have fallen victim to criminals looking to disrupt our lives and demand millions of dollars in ransom. To think these attacks may be state-sponsored is even more disturbing.
The healthcare industry is certainly not immune to these threats because the value of protected health information is among the highest priced target data for sale on the black market. Just this week the FBI Director, Christopher Wray compared the ransomware attack threats to those of 9/11. The regional power grids are of particularly susceptible to cyberattacks because of the aging infrastructures upon which they rely.
Because of this, it is imperative that technologists in the healthcare industry work to ensure systems and applications are built with redundancy and resiliency in mind, and that they be designed to essentially be impervious to power outages. On-premise data centers (those built-in corporate offices and managed by corporate employees) have given way to purpose-built sophisticated co-location facilities and cloud-based solutions such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. These data centers rely on redundant power grids, battery backups and generators to ensure that a power outage, whether due to cyberattacks, human error or equipment malfunction do not affect the accessibility of a mission critical application.
What does this mean for you? When selecting an EVV software vendor, do your due diligence and ensure they can recover from power outages and other potential disruptions, or even better, avoid them altogether. Time is money! Remember in the event of an outage, every minute your EVV system is inaccessible due to a power outage, you are not processing claims, you can’t process payroll and you don’t have real time visibility into your organization’s activity or health; essentially, you’re at a standstill. When the system finally does come back up, you may have to wait for everything that was queued to catch up which might take hours or even days (assuming it was captured during the outage).
Sandata values our customers’ data as if were our own. Because of that, we work diligently to architect resilient data centers and solutions. Our data centers have multiple generators and UPS equipment, all of which are tested weekly. We utilize the same ‘Class A’ data centers used by the government and by some of the largest technology companies in the world. Like many businesses, we also take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS), making sure all applications are replicated and recoverable in another AWS data center, perhaps in another region of the country, within minutes should it be necessary.
Whether it is ensuring our uptime behind the scenes or investing in technology and support, Sandata is here to partner with you in getting more right from the start.
