Data is beyond vital in healthcare. It is sacrosanct. It can mean the difference between a correct diagnosis and a flawed one. It can even spell the difference between life and death. This is why data has to be available 24/7—neither to be lost nor tampered with. This is one of the key themes in Veeam’s “2022 Data Protection Trends” report, which uncovered two disconcerting trends.
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The first trend is that here is a 96% perceived “availability gap” between Service Level Agreement-based expectations and how quickly IT teams can actually return to productivity. This perceived gap is just about in line with the global number for all other industries, which is already high to begin with at 90%! Meaning that healthcare decision-makers do not believe that their IT can bring their systems back online quickly enough.
The second trend the report found is that 52% of healthcare servers suffered at least one outage last year, which is also higher than the global average. Both these trends are worrisome, and they simply cannot persist given the critical role of data in healthcare. It is at least encouraging then that healthcare organisations are striving to protect not only high-priority data but all other data. This reaffirms the idea that all data matters, and that all data needs protection. Consider:
Need, therefore, is being met by action. But this action, to be most effective, requires healthcare institutions to modernise their backup and recovery capabilities. And this needs to happen now, especially given the rise of the “quantified patient,” which is accelerating data expansion from a variety of sources such as:
- Electronic health records and electronic medical records.
- Remote patient monitoring, telehealth and mobile health (mHealth) data.
- Health maintenance and wellness data.
Unfortunately, healthcare institutions are being held back by a “set it and forget it” approach to backup and recovery. This touch-and-go mindset is gravely counterintuitive as backup and recovery is actually a foundational element of data security. It ultimately contributes to healthcare organisations being heavily at risk of failures and cybersecurity breaches.
The only logical course of action for healthcare organisations, therefore, is to upgrade their data backup, recovery and management strategies. Beyond giving your data security a much-needed boost, newer, more modern solutions are so advanced already that they also offer a range of additional features and functionalities, including the following:
- Unified data protection, irrespective of where they are located.
- Faster recovery times.
- Scalability depends on the institution’s needs.
- Integration with other platforms.
- Improved cost savings.
Put simply, modern data backup, recovery and management meet a pressing need in healthcare—data protection. And it is exactly the kind of platform an institution can use to keep pace with the continuing explosion of data and keep it safe and always available. But that is just one component of modern data backup, recovery and management. The other is that it can unleash fully the true, transformative power of underutilised data.
There is, however, an important caveat: Only industry-leading data protection providers can provide reliable data protection and enable an organisation to get the most value from all their data. Veeam in this case is a leader of leaders when it comes to providing backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection. All those are integrated on a single platform, thereby simplifying data protection and management.
In this data-driven digital age, a comprehensive data strategy is now foundational to organisations regardless of industry. It is perhaps more so in healthcare, where data can mean the difference between life and death. Central to that strategy is obviously data protection and disaster recovery. But it should no longer be implemented in isolation. Instead, it should be part of a more comprehensive strategy that looks to find new ways to maximise data. Backup and recovery can be stepping stones to that end but only if offered by a leading modern data backup, recovery and management provider—like Veeam.
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