Security

How NetApp Helped a Healthcare Organization Meet Epic Honor Roll Criteria

Collaboration among CDW, NetApp and a shared customer helped one healthcare organization create indelible snapshots of backups — and make the Epic Honor Roll.

Brian Eastwood

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Brian Eastwood is a freelance writer with more than 15 years of experience covering healthcare IT, healthcare delivery, enterprise IT, consumer technology, IT leadership and higher education.

Across healthcare, organizations are updating backup and storage systems to protect valuable data assets. Indelible backups (or snapshots) are one of the key elements of a backup modernization strategy, as they ensure data cannot be modified or deleted.

Indelible snapshots offer a clear benefit when it comes to responding to a data breach. They provide organizations with a reliable backup that allows for quick recovery, minimal disruption to business operations and protection against ransomware demands. There’s an additional business benefit as well. Support for indelible snapshots helps organizations climb the Epic Honor Roll — and increased proficiency with Epic brings financial incentives.

CDW, in collaboration with NetApp — the developer of SnapLock and Tamperproof Snapshot technologies — offers healthcare organizations a dependable solution to meet Epic Honor Roll requirements for secure, immutable data snapshots.

“Organizations need a way to secure their data and make sure people who need it have access to it — but not everybody else,” says Travis Rubida, specialized engineer with CDW. “That way, data doesn’t get leaked, and it’s always where it needs to be. Access to data must be constant, as patient care involves critical, life-or-death decisions.”

DISCOVER: How does NetApp help healthcare organizations transform their data infrastructure?

Shifting From Immutable to Indelible Backups

For any business application, manual workflows for data backups can pose a challenge. Organizations need to coordinate the schedules of the database administrator, the storage admin, the server admin and the security team. Once a backup is complete, organizations need to validate the success of the backup across the disparate environments where data resides. “It becomes difficult to support, and it creates a lot of work for people,” Rubida says.

About two years ago, CDW built a process to automate immutable backups and refreshes within the Epic environment using NetApp technology. The company rolled the solution out to several healthcare customers, Rubida says, and the response was positive.

Recently, a customer using the automated backup solution approached CDW with a dilemma. The organization was looking to improve its Epic Honor Roll status. Hospitals and health systems invest in technology infrastructure, training and customizations to make Epic software more secure and easier to use within their organization. In exchange for demonstrating their proficiency with Epic software, the company provides grants and other financial incentives to entities that appear on the Epic Honor Roll.

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For this customer to improve its status, it needed to transition from immutable to indelible snapshots. This is an important data protection distinction. While an immutable backup cannot have its contents modified, it can be deleted. On the other hand, an indelible backup can only be deleted or overwritten when the data reaches its expiration date. If an attacker gains access to a data protection solution, it can delete an immutable backup but not an indelible backup. The latter allows for quick recovery from an attack and creates a backup that’s not worth holding for ransom.

In simple terms, the customer needed updated workflows for automated indelible backups. It needed them quickly too: The Epic Honor Roll submission deadline was weeks away. “The situation needed to be rectified before Epic would sign off on it,” Rubida says.

Embracing a Collaborative Approach to Workflow Automation

NetApp SnapLock has proved popular in the financial services industry, Rubida notes. If a company sends a customer a 401(k) statement, SnapLock ensures the statement cannot be modified. “There’s no back door,” he says. “There’s no way to delete or modify the contents of the document.”

To meet Epic Honor Roll requirements, the customer partnered with CDW and NetApp to implement automated, indelible backup workflows using Tamperproof Snapshots. CDW first developed a mock environment to test and validate the automation processes, ensuring the backups were truly tamper proof. Once confirmed, CDW deployed the solution within the customer’s live environment. The entire project was completed within two weeks, enabling the customer to meet the Epic Honor Roll deadline on time.

The automated indelible backup workflows met Epic’s requirements. The organization made the Epic Honor Roll and, as a result, has achieved savings of approximately $1 million per year.

Beyond the financial savings, the customer is also better positioned to protect itself against ransomware attacks, which is one of the biggest security threats facing healthcare.

“Organizations are looking to ensure they have a safeguarded copy of data. That way, if something were to happen, they could recover from it,” Rubida says. “NetApp Tamperproof Snapshot technology can restore from tamper-proof data snapshots in a matter of minutes, whether it’s 1 terabyte or 200TB. That helps organizations get up and running quickly.”

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