Healthcare needs don’t wait for data recovery. Providence Health Plan increased resilience by switching to Cohesity.

The Challenge

Providence Health Plan provides health coverage and administers employer-funded plans in several states in the western United States. Data is the heartbeat of the business because care providers need to review a member’s coverage details, claims, and payment history before pre-approving visits and procedures. If the data isn’t there, members face an awful choice: postpone treatment until it can be authorized—or risk having to pay out of pocket.

“To make sure data isn’t lost, we’re required by Medicare to keep monthly backups for one year and yearly backups for ten more years,” says Rebecca Bach, Senior Infrastructure Engineer. Fast restores are also critical, both to keep the business operating smoothly and for compliance. Each day that data is unavailable because of a cyberattack or a server update gone awry subjects Providence Health Plan to potential fines from Medicare of up to millions of dollars a day.

Previously, Providence Health Plan used a managed backup service to back up 600 TB of data and virtual machines, including the TriZetto FACETS application used for claims processing, billing, and care management.

But backups were “a constant battle,” according to Bach. “To back up an 80 TB database we had to break it into several chunks, and backing up just one of those chunks sometimes took 2-3 weeks. Whenever the vendor released a software update, I had to drop everything else to update the software on 1,100 servers.” The tipping point came when a Windows file system failed, and the IT team discovered with dismay that the backup was unusable. The team began looking for a modern data management solution that was secure, reliable, and easy to manage. “Cyber security is a top focus for the entire organization, and part of cyber security is data resilience after an attack,” Bach says.

The Solution

Providence Health Plan found its solution in Cohesity, recommended by an executive who had used it at a previous employer and was impressed with its data security features and reliable performance. “Cohesity won our confidence because of its technology—and its people,” says Reuben Spence, Senior Manager of Infrastructure Engineering. “When we met with the Cohesity team, it was clear they understood the kind of data we back up, our security requirements, and the issues we had with the old solution so that we can avoid them going forward. They also educated us on how to secure our backups. It’s a true partnership.”

Today, Providence Health Plan keeps an immutable Cohesity backup of all data on-premises for 30 days. “With a simple setting we lock down backups so that no one, not even an administrator, can delete them before the retention period ends,” says Bach. After 30 days, production data is moved automatically to an isolated Cohesity FortKnox vault on AWS, where it’s retained for one year. The company’s cyber security team is pleased with FortKnox because the offline, virtual air gap backup adds another layer of cyber resilience and satisfies a requirement for cyber insurance. After the year is up, files are moved automatically to AWS Glacier for another 10 years.

Cohesity provided a deployment plan, which Bach executed entirely on her own. “The Cohesity infrastructure and management interface are very intuitive,” she says. “We moved most of our 1,100 servers to Cohesity in 30 days—and completely finished the transition in less than 60 days. With any other solution I would have expected the migration to take 4-6 months.” Bach and her team took online courses through Cohesity Academy to learn the ins and outs of data management and resilience. “Cohesity Academy training was thorough, which enabled us to hit the ground running,” Bach says.

The Results

With immutable Cohesity backups on-prem and in Cohesity FortKnox, the IT team now has confidence that it can restore clean data after a system failure or cyberattack. “With our old backup solution, getting a good restore was a crapshoot,” Bach says. “With Cohesity, we’re confident we have the clean data we need for cyber resilience. We haven’t missed a single backup, and it’s reassuring to know that if we ever lose hundreds of files, VMs, or databases, we can recover them all in minutes with an Instant Mass Restore.”

In just the first year, Cohesity’s immutable backups twice proved their value for business resilience. The first time was when someone inadvertently deleted 10 years of SAP Crystal reports instead of the one year intended. Fast restoration of clean data avoided CMS fines and a costly risk-mitigation effort. The incident happened during the transition from the old managed backup service to Cohesity, enabling Bach to do a head-to-head comparison. “Restoring 3 TB of backups on AWS Glacier took seven days with our previous backup solution, and just a few hours with Cohesity,” she reports. Fast restores saved the day once again when the company’s disaster recovery team requested a proof of concept for quickly replicating on-prem servers to AWS, as part of a SOC 2 audit. “I wouldn’t have even attempted replicating bare-metal servers to the cloud with our previous backup solution,” says Spence. “But with Cohesity we showed that we could restore critical application servers in a cloud data center in just a couple of days.” The IT team attended a Cohesity Ransomware Resilience Workshop in late 2024.

Bach is pleased that in addition to increasing cyber resilience, the self-managed Cohesity solution takes far less of her time than the managed backup service it replaced. “Whenever our old vendor released new software we had to update every server agent, which took days even with a script,” she said. “With Cohesity, I just run a report to see which servers need updating, and update them with one click. I’m saving about seven days of work with each upgrade.”

Now Providence Health Plan is looking at new ways to simplify operations and cut costs with Cohesity. One idea is shifting certain backups from high-cost cloud servers to the data center, using Cohesity on Pure Storage. Another is moving infrequently accessed reports and spreadsheets from production servers to Cohesity SmartFiles, providing links for people who check the original location.

“Our members and providers count on us for prompt, accurate pre-approvals and claims processing, which means we need rapid data recovery after system failures or cyber incidents,” says Fernando Acosta, CIO. “With its focus on data security, Cohesity is helping to keep our operations resilient.”