After a horrendous ransomware attack on three US hospitals, some Australian hospitals, seven to be exact, have been the recent victim to ransomware attacks. Yes, that’s right, seven hospitals. The hospitals were located in Gippsland and south-west Victoria and several day-to-day operations were disrupted.
The Attack
After the ransomware attack, many electrical surgery and appointments were cancelled. Many computer systems were disconnected following the attack, which means most of the patient records, appointment bookings and management services were shut down till further notice.
This affected the daily operations of the hospitals and they were forced to move to manual systems wherever it was applicable to keep the services going, to some extent. In other cases, many patients were asked to re-schedule their appointments and walk-ins as their history and charts and other medical records were unavailable. They must use cloud disaster recovery solutions to over come the problem.
Reports suggest that it could take weeks before all the issues were dealt with and all the hospitals resumed to full functionality. This is very unfortunate and if the hospitals had a better DR backup plan or policy, all this could have been avoided.
The need for a Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan
With a rapidly growing number of ransomware attacks, it has become extremely vital for hospitals or any other organization to setup a DR Backup plan for their data and systems. This is especially true in the case of hospitals and medical institutions as they cannot afford or risk any downtime whatsoever.
Many patients were diverted to other hospitals and it created a huge inconvenience for them. Now, if the hospitals had a proper backup and recovery appliance or a cloud backup and disaster recovery solution, all this could have been avoided.
By opting for such a solution, they could have easily recovered their data and would have protected their systems from ransomware. Usually the RTOs is very low. Most vendors offer very less recovery time, as low as 15 minutes which is extremely beneficial in terms on business continuity and offers no downtime. StoneFly, for instance offers such DR Backup solutions to many leading companies worldwide.
Conclusion
Setting up a DR Backup solution, enables hospitals or any other organization to be one step ahead from these cyber-criminals. Their data and systems are protected against ransomware through proper encryption and ensures no downtime.
