Without the proper backups, one cybersecurity event or accidental loss of data could mean a healthcare office loses critical patient records or sensitive data necessary for keeping the office functioning. This is why healthcare offices should begin working with an IT consultant early in their digitization process or as soon as they realize their backups are not as reliable as they should be. With the right help, healthcare professionals can make sure their data backup solutions have the features that make sense for them and the right plans in place to ensure valuable data and patient records are secure.
Reliable Recovery
Reliable data recovery means that your office can retrieve data within a targeted length of time, often referred to as a recovery time objective. Factors such as how often data is backed up and the processes available to access backed up data can impact how long it takes to recover, so a reliable service makes setting consistent restore points simple and provides flexible options for accessing files. Healthcare offices should have access to options, such as choosing to have backups restored through their IT consultant or have access to control panels that allow in-house IT staff to recover data when you need it.
Seeding Backups
If your healthcare office hasn’t implemented backup services for its digital records, it’s possible that you have an amount of data that’s not possible to upload to a cloud service in a reasonable amount of time. For circumstances like this, the best services allow companies to seed a backup by uploading data to a hard drive provided by the service. The practice will be sent a physical drive to upload data to before mailing it back to the service company. This way, bulk data can be transferred quickly while sensitive patient data is transferred using a secure connection that will be much faster with the help of the seeded backup.
Backup Testing
Even with the best data backup services, things can go wrong and prevent your data from being there when needed. This is why the service your healthcare practice wants will offer regular backup testing to ensure you can restore your network with confidence. With regular backup testing performed, your staff or IT consultant can simply verify the backup test results as part of an established recovery plan instead of performing the test themselves. This testing can include on-site and cloud-based backups, so no matter where your office chooses to store its data, you can be sure your data backups are up to date and ready to restore your network when needed.
Summary
For office digitization to be successful, an office’s data must be backed up regularly and restoring the network to a previous point should be fast and easy. To ensure that your data backup service is doing the most for your practice, it should have flexible options to reduce the amount of time it takes to recover, strategies for establishing backups for the first time that match your network’s unique situation, and regular tests that let you know that your data is ready when you need it. These features are some of the most important for a backup service, but if you want to know more about how to successfully backup your data, our team is standing by to help!
