The Impact of Ransomware on Healthcare Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity and Practical Steps to Improve

As ransomware inundates healthcare organizations, everyone is trying to figure out how they can prepare their healthcare organization for these ongoing attacks.  As one CISO told me, we have to be right every time and the hacker only has to be right once.  Needless to say, ransomware is a big issue that’s causing a lot of stress to healthcare CIOs and CISOs.

In a recent discussion with Gerry Blass, President & CEO of ComplyAssistant, he pointed out a number of things about ransomware that make it a unique challenge for healthcare organizations from a disaster recovery and business continuity perspective.  Not the least of which is that any healthcare organization could be hit by ransomware.  Plus, unlike many other disaster recovery situations, how much downtime you’ll have from ransomware is undetermined and may last for a long time.

In the video below, you can learn more about how the world of disaster recovery and business continuity (DRBC) has been changing and what’s needed in healthcare organizations today.  Plus, Blass shares some of the common issues he sees in healthcare organizations DRBC plans.

We also dive into whether healthcare organizations should pay the ransom and some of the challenges a healthcare organization will need to consider if they do want to pay the ransom (ie. $20k per day limit on buying bitcoin).  Blass also shares his thoughts on when to involve local police and the FBI and the benefits of doing so. Plus, he offers some good first steps that healthcare organizations can take to make sure they’re better prepared for disasters.

Check out the interview below for more info on disaster recovery and business continuity and how ransomware has changed both of these important efforts.

Learn more about ComplyAssistant: https://www.complyassistant.com/

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About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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