Managed Security Services – Can you afford NOT to have them?
By Gil Vidals, , HIPAA Blog, Resources, Security

Network uptime – your patients depend on it.

As cloud-based technology increasingly becomes the preferred means by which companies conduct business, not having the right services in place to protect against unexpected downtimes – whether from hardware/software failures or security compromises – can spell disaster.

As the recent Amazon S3 outage proves, catastrophic infrastructure failures do happen – even to major providers.

When you can’t provide critical treatments – because networks are down and critical applications are unavailable – it can spell disaster for your patients. Unnecessary suffering may result.
 
In addition, costs can quickly skyrocket. Loss in productivity, revenue, and consumer confidence may result.
 
The good news is, outsourcing your daily IT needs – including network monitoring, hardware & data concerns, and applying the latest security patches – to a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP), can actually help cut costs while streamlining your business operations.
 
More importantly, MSSP’s can mitigate many of the common causes of system downtime:
  • Recent Studies demonstrate that 80% of outages impacting mission-critical services are caused by people and process issues.
  • The physical components of servers may degrade, while logic errors and failed updates contribute to software failures
  • Datacenter outages can spring from faulty maintenance (e.g. failed generators utilized in a power loss, faulty fire suppression systems, etc.)

The Benefits

Leveraging the expertise of a Managed Security Service Provider offers a strategic method for ensuring uptime – critical for maintaining healthcare services. Typically, one monthly payment covers network maintenance, updates, and repairs.

In this way, the MSSP simplifies your business while providing peace of mind through:

1. Preserving vital uptime and fast response times

The MSSP is dedicated to preventing the issues that impact your network efficiency and security.  24/7/365 infrastructure monitoring, routine backups, and Disaster Recovery services help your network remain available, and responsive.

2. Providing the latest in security patches and updates

Staying on top of the latest threats to your system allows the MSSP to mitigate malware attacks and costly security breaches. If protected data and electronic health information is a concern, encrypted email, and servers – an important part of a HIPAA compliant environment – can also be monitored and maintained.

3. Offering an efficient, scalable environment

An MSSP is able to increase or decrease resources (CPUs, memory, virtual servers, etc.) to optimize your system based on heavier or lighter loads maximizes efficiency, without a loss in performance.

The increasing sophistication and dependence upon network and secure cloud processes for doing business make maintaining uptime all the more critical.

Utilizing the expertise that MSSP’s can provide goes a long way toward meeting and maintaining that goal.