As a former IT practitioner in the healthcare space, I know one thing to be true—keeping patient information available to healthcare practitioners is absolutely imperative. Not only is your patient data in Network Attached Storage (NAS) shares and picture archiving and communication system (PACS) images critical, it needs to be available for immediate care. It also needs to be accessible for many years to align with HIPAA regulations for retention. Easy, right? Not necessarily—let me explain.
Today, file and object management is more than just choosing a basic storage solution and deploying it. Cloud, security, and recovery should be front and center with the decision-making process. Gone are the days when an organization knows it has backed up its data and tested the recovery so they can just assume recovery from any data disaster is possible. The decision-making process around storage is more complex than that. Let’s take a closer look at the current cyber threat landscape, understand what it takes to be recovery ready and how Cohesity SmartFiles can help—with a specific focus on your PACS imaging systems and NAS shares.
Cyber Threat Reality
With the escalation in cyber threats targeting organizations globally, we need any data—including the important healthcare data on NAS shares and PACS systems—to have more resilience than ever. With ransomware being one of the primary threats that today’s organizations face, it’s important to consider that data can be impacted even in its backed up state without the proper measures in place. We are also now being asked to be on heightened alert by the CISA Shields Up program, which offers organizational guidance around preparedness and truly demonstrates that any backup and recovery approaches of the past are not the path for the future. It’s clear that we need to be open to rethinking the way we protect patient data, and more importantly, how we ensure the recoverability of our PACS system images or medical information on NAS shares.
Is Your Organization Recovery Ready?
When deploying a PACS system or NAS shares for medical information, immediate and long-term storage strategies are an important decision. Traditional storage is just storage that may offer some safety nets such as tamperproof, write once, read many (WORM)-based storage for the primary dataset. But what are you doing to secure your patient medical data right down to the backup? Also consider the fact that PACS images could be on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge, so having a hybrid deployment also adds management complexity. This might leave you wondering if you can actually recover the patient files and images when you need them, and should have you reconsidering the toolsets you are using. Are they as security ready as you need from not only a storage perspective but also from a recovery perspective? With the right set of tools, this can be done from a single UI regardless of where the patient data exists.
How Cohesity Can Help
The answer is quite simple and comes down to these key elements that allow for recoverability and improved security posture around medical data on NAS shares and PACS images:
- Multicloud efficiency: Many healthcare organizations are storing their data wherever it best aligns with their needs, meaning the data resides in many disparate locations; in the cloud, on-premises, and at the edge. Regardless of your data’s location, with Cohesity your data can be managed centrally with automated lifecycle management.
- Intelligent data management: It’s one thing to have a bunch of great data that you know is supporting your organization and the customers it serves, but it’s another to have insights into and an understanding of that data. With Cohesity we have several integrated applications that will allow for antivirus checking, personally identifiable information (PII) detection for compliance, analytics of actions taken on the files (ex. delete, modify, edit, etc.), and more.
- Active cyber defense: It might be impossible to stay ahead of the current cybersecurity landscape, but a common approach is to have multiple layers of detection and protection in place. With Cohesity we offer a layer to your cyber security strategy by offering many key security elements such as a hardened platform, access control with multi-factor authentication (MFA)/role-based access control (RBAC), ransomware anomaly detection with alerting, the ability to back up and recover your data.
By leveraging Cohesity SmartFiles for your PACS images and NAS files within your healthcare organization, you are deploying a unified file and object solution that meets the most challenging unstructured data management needs, now and long into the future. You will also be adhering to stringent compliance regulations today with the ability to adapt to new requirements as they emerge. With Cohesity, your patient data strategy gets an upgrade in approach, with key benefits around meeting storage requirements, cloud support, insights into your data, and an improved security posture.
