Whether it’s patient records, medical images, research data or financial records, protecting data information is crucial. Unfortunately, healthcare has also become a top target for ransomware attacks.
With ransomware on the rise, healthcare providers need robust data protection strategies now more than ever. While there is no single solution, tape backup plays a key role in minimizing ransomware risk when used as part of a comprehensive data protection plan.
Read on, and we will explore 9 ways that tape backup can help healthcare organizations defend against ransomware attacks.
1. Offline Data Immutability
One of the main benefits of tape backup solutions is that the data is immutable—that is, once it is written to tape, ransomware cannot alter or remove it. Ransomware operates by encrypting files on active systems and network shares that are online and accessible. But because tape cartridges are physically removed from systems and stored offline in a secure vault, the backed-up data is safe from ransomware encryption even if an attack occurs. This immutability allows healthcare organizations to recover encrypted or deleted files from tape in the event of an attack.
2. Frequent, Automated Backups
Regular backups are necessary to minimize data loss in the event of an attack that encrypts or deletes files, thereby effectively mitigating the risk of ransomware. Tape storage systems are designed for scheduled, set-it-and-forget-it automation of daily, weekly and monthly backup jobs. This ensures healthcare data is backed up to tape on a recurring basis without manual intervention. Automated backups to tape provide the frequent data snapshots needed to restore systems from the most recent unencrypted state possible in a ransomware event.
3. Long-Term Retention
While other backup targets, like disks or the cloud, have limited storage capacities and retention periods, tape provides virtually limitless storage and retention for healthcare data. Regulations like HIPAA require medical records and patient information to be retained for designated periods, which can be decades for some data types. Tape storage meets these long-term retention needs through LTO generations that offer 30 years or more of usable archive life. This allows healthcare organizations to keep historical patient records, medical images, and other data accessible even years after it was originally backed up.
4. Offsite Storage
To truly protect data, backups must be stored safely offsite in a separate physical location than the primary systems and network. Ransomware commonly spreads throughout entire networks, so onsite backups alone provide little defense. Tape libraries paired with offsite vaulting services give healthcare IT the ability to physically remove full backup sets to an entirely different secure location each day, week or month. This geographical separation of the production environment and backup media prevents ransomware from encrypting both primary systems and all associated onsite backups in one attack.
5. Rapid Restore Times
Modern LTO tape backup drives are capable of throughput rates measured in hundreds of megabytes per second for both reading and writing data. This allows full terabytes or petabytes of information to be retrieved from tape incredibly quickly. For perspective, a single LTO-9 tape cartridge can hold up to 18 terabytes of compressed healthcare data. Drives are able to read that much information from tape in just a couple hours.
- By comparison, restoring even a fraction of that amount of data from VMware virtualization or disk backups could potentially take days or even weeks, depending on available bandwidth and infrastructure. Cloud egress fees would also be significantly higher to retrieve that much information compared to inline tape restores.
- Another advantage is that today’s tape libraries have numerous read/write heads that can simultaneously restore different tapes at once. So healthcare organizations can restore entire backup sets containing thousands of tapes in a matter of hours rather than days. This level of parallelism simply isn’t possible with other targets.
Tape systems also utilize techniques like incremental forever backups. This means only changed blocks need to be restored, rather than entire full backups each time. Combined with solid-state read caches, this further reduces restore times from minutes to just seconds for small files and individual virtual machines.
6. Low Cost Per Gigabyte
Data growth in healthcare continues to skyrocket with new technologies like precision medicine, genomics and medical imaging. As storage needs increase exponentially, the cost of protecting petabytes of patient information becomes prohibitive without a cost-effective solution. For cash-strapped healthcare budgets, tape backup solutions deliver high capacity and long-term retention at the lowest possible cost. This is a huge advantage over the public cloud, which charges egress and storage fees year over year.
7. Easy Scalability
As data volumes surge, healthcare organizations need backup targets that scale on demand without disruption. Tape libraries are highly scalable through the addition of drive slots and larger-capacity LTO cartridges over time. As new LTO standards are introduced every few years with 2-3x capacity increases, tape storage scales seamlessly with no application changes or data migration required. This facilitates continuous data growth for decades. In contrast, scaling other options like cloud or disk necessitates complex data migration projects that strain limited healthcare IT budgets and resources.
8. Compliance with Regulations
Protecting the privacy of patient health information (PHI) and adhering to regulations like HIPAA are paramount for healthcare. Tape backup assists with these compliance needs through immutable, air-gapped storage that prevents unauthorized access to or alteration of backed-up records. Full-tape inventories also simplify audits by providing a complete historical record of all backup jobs. And with long-term retention exceeding 10–30 years, tape ensures healthcare data retention meets all legal and industry standards for preservation. This gives providers confidence that their data protection strategies will pass regulatory scrutiny.
9. Easy Integration with Healthcare IT
For busy healthcare IT teams already stretched thin, backup solutions need to integrate seamlessly into existing infrastructure and workflows. Leading tape backup software is designed for simplicity and includes features like virtual tape libraries that make management as effortless as disk. Deep application integrations also streamline the protection of electronic health records (EHR), picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), and other critical healthcare applications. Tape fits cleanly alongside backup targets like disks without disrupting established processes or requiring new skills.
In Summary
Ransomware continues to evolve to specifically target the healthcare industry’s sensitive patient data. While no single solution can provide full protection on its own, incorporating tape backup as a core component of data protection strategies delivers multiple advantages to mitigate ransomware risks. The immutable, offline nature of tape physically isolates backed-up healthcare information from ransomware encryption. Automated, frequent backups ensure recent data snapshots are always available for rapid restore.