Why Storage and Backups Are a Key Component of Healthcare Cybersecurity
With that in mind, Baltazar says, most organizations have made public cloud storage an important part of their data strategy, and they’ve settled on a multipronged cybersecurity approach.
“First, there’s the protection part,” he says, which includes data encryption, for example. “But then there’s also the part where you say, ‘Well, if we’re going to get hacked, we’d better have a strong recovery methodology.’”
Just a few years ago, Baltazar says, “almost nobody thought that backups were important.” That’s no longer the case today. “Now, people are worried about holes in their safety nets. They’re looking at their backups and asking what they can do to protect those as well.”
The answer often involves things such as data bunkers, multiple storage sites and ensuring that backups are air-gapped or immutable, Baltazar says. “You can’t just be thinking, ‘We’ve backed up, so if worse comes to worst we’ll fall back on that.’ The people who have been doing ransomware and doing it successfully, they know that’s the playbook.”
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Marc Hrzic, senior director of IT at Pittsburgh-based UPMC, is aware of that fact. “There are bad people out there trying every day to get in at your weakest point,” he says.
UPMC today has about 49 petabytes of allocated storage and more than 13,000 virtualized servers, Hrzic says. “We’re a heavily automated, hybrid organization where we have a lot of workloads that run in the cloud, but we also have a lot running in our data center.”
UPMC’s storage protection strategy is “multilevel,” he adds. “The challenge is that we have to do everything right all of the time, but the perpetrator only has to get in once to cause an extreme amount of damage.”
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Given that, UPMC uses monitoring solutions designed to detect malware before it can launch. The organization also relies on IBM Spectrum Storage and Dell EMC tools and on the IBM FlashSystem platform.
“From a block storage perspective, we’re 100 percent flash storage in the data center,” Hrzic says. The IBM system takes 49 petabytes of data and reduces it to 34 for storage purposes, he says, and UPMC uses synchronous replication under a global namespace to ensure data availability across multiple data centers in different geographical locations.
“At the end of the day, everything we do is about the patient and delivering applications to frontline clinicians,” Hrzic says. “But that all starts with having a solid foundation for data protection and security.”
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