DRaaS Provider Comport Reviews Five DR Best Practices

Comport Consulting Corporation, a DRaaS providers for the healthcare industry, held an industry event to discuss best practices for DR specific to healthcare organizations.

Among the topics discussed were the following:

• Healthcare organizations must assess their current DR readiness: Healthcare organizations know that they have a responsibility to protect patient data but what happens in an outage…do you really know? It is important for you to do the work before you have an issue. A DR assessment can be an important part of safeguarding your PHI and other mission critical data.
• Performing a consequence analysis: Understanding your current DR readiness is only the first step. Knowing where you have gaps only matters if you also understand how this can affect your business in an outage. What are the consequences to your patients, your practitioners and your bottom line should an outage happen?
• Understanding your solution requirements: Now that you know where you stand, you should identify where you want to go. Analyze the capabilities of your internal staff, do they have the ability to spend time needed to implement the changes required for a complete DR solution. Ask yourself if they also have the time to ensure the RTOs and RPOs necessary for your business? Understand if your current infrastructure can take into account data protection for your mobility requirements. Finally examine your specific needs for compliance, security and regulation.
• Finding the right solution for you: You have the choice of a full in house DR solution, a fully hosted solution or many hybrid points in between. What our ComportSecure team is finding is that healthcare organizations can no longer do it alone. In many cases, a company will maintain a hybrid solution with traditional architecture coupled with enterprise cloud backup (BaaS) and cloud DR (DRaaS) services.
• Finding the right DRaaS provider for you: The vendor that you choose should be able to address your compliance needs, specialize in protecting data in the healthcare industry and provide options for both on premise and cloud solutions delivering the best both worlds. Take advantage of the 15 day DR as a service free trial that many organizations offer. Try before you buy.

“The healthcare industry is facing increased threats to their data simply because healthcare records are worth more. Healthcare organizations can no longer afford to look the other way,” said Eric Young, principal cloud architect,  ComportSecure. “Having a DR plan in place that is accurate and sophisticated is an essential part of your overall business strategy.“