Hospital Becomes Immune to Ransomware with StoneFly and Veeam
Challenges:
The hospital wanted a backup and DR solution that protected confidential patient information and medical records from cyber-threats and, in the event of a ransomware attack, enabled them to restore critical systems with minimum downtime.
Solution:
StoneFly Veeam-Ready Backup and DR Solution (DR365V) with built-in air-gapping, immutability, delta-based snapshots, encryption, and S3 object lockdown.
Results:
- Automated air-gapping,
isolation, and ransomware
protection. - Immutable WORM volumes with file lockdown and S3
object lockdown capabilities. - Reduced Recovery Time
Objectives (RTOs) using
features such as instant VM recovery, granular file-level restore, and more.
Organization
The client is a hospital responsible for the health and wellness of thousands of Americans with medical-surgical healthcare, cardiac intensive care, and other intensive care units.
Industry
Healthcare
Challenges
The hospital is responsible for delivering public healthcare services to a community of tens of thousands of people. Driven by their passion to improve the quality of life and health of the region’s residents, the hospital employs state-of-the-art technology to process and retain patient information and medical records. While this allows them to effectively cater to the needs of their patients, it also makes them a target for cyber-threats such as ransomware.
According to the US department of health and human services, 34% of healthcare organizations worldwide were hit by ransomware last year. 65% that were hit reported that the cybercriminals were able to encrypt their data.
As a result of a yearly audit, the IT team for the hospital realized that their backup and disaster recovery (DR) systems weren’t as robust as they’d prefer. In the event of a ransomware attack, they estimated that it would take them a lot longer to recover which would in turn lead to patients being kept in hospitals longer, delays in tests and procedures, and in the worst case, contributing to patient deaths.
“We wanted the ability to recover quickly and restore critical operations within minutes” said Nicholas, the IT manager at the hospital, “As a healthcare service provider, we needed a solution that guarantees data sovereignty, is affordable, and helps us with compliance”
Solution
The hospital chose StoneFly’s Veeam-Ready backup and DR appliance (DR365V) to replace their current backup system.
“With Veeam’s backup and replication features and StoneFly’s air-gapping and immutability, we’re confident in our ability to protect our critical systems from ransomware attacks,” said Nicholas.
With the DR365V, the hospital’s IT team can store frequently-used information on high performance hot-tier storage drives and store infrequently-accessed data in affordable cloud tiers. Furthermore, the built-in immutability features of DR365V also enables the hospital to set up backup strategies such as 3-2-1, 3-2-1-1-0, or 4-3-2 – ensuring reliable data protection and simplifying compliance.
The Results
With StoneFly’s Veeam-Ready backup and DR appliance (DR365V) the hospital was able to protect sensitive patient information from a ransomware attack and restore critical systems within minutes.
The hospital uses Veeam to backup terabytes of medical records and 20 virtual machines (VMs) running on VMware hypervisor – storing copies on-premises, in the cloud, and in the built-in air-gapped and immutable volumes on DR365V.
“Ransomware encrypted our entire production environment, including backups” said Jeremy, the Senior IT Support at the hospital, “After making sure that we had removed the malware, we were able to quickly spin up our critical VMs and restore our data using the Veeam backups stored in air-gapped volumes. We didn’t lose anything”
Ransomware-Proof Immutable Storage for Critical Patient Data and Medical Records
By leveraging the Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) volumes, S3 object lockdown, and file lockdown features of DR365V, patient information is stored in highly secure ransomware-proof storage media – on-premises and/or in the cloud.
In addition to cybersecurity, the immutable storage volumes also prevent data loss due to human loss – which is one of the major causes of data loss worldwide.
Ensure Data Sovereignty and HIPAA Compliance
With the DR365V, the hospital’s IT team is always in complete control of their data’s lifecycle which in turn simplifies their compliance journey for regulations such as HIPAA and HITRUST.
Simple and Quick Restore for Critical Systems
“In the event of a ransomware attack, we needed a solution that helped us be back up and running as soon as possible. We needed it to be simple and quick – and StoneFly and Veeam do that for us”
For hospitals, a delay in restoring critical systems can be a life and death matter – the ability to quickly and seamlessly restore operations enables the hospital to provide better and more reliable healthcare to the region.
Looking to protect critical IT infrastructure from ransomware? Contact us today
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