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If you are a doctor, or work in a clinic, hospital, or lab, then you already know about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and are familiar with the Security Rules component that requires you to use certain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect all your electronic data. But being aware of HIPAA doesn't mean you understand how to comply with it, or have the resources to do so. The law can be very confusing, and has most certainly resulted in additional workload for your office. 
A data backup plan, a disaster recovery plan, an emergency mode operation plan, physical safeguards, and technical safeguards are all requirements that you need to address. That's a lot of work, isn't it? The good news is that you can outsource some of that work, and if you choose carefully, a single service provider can support many of your compliance efforts. By selecting a full-featured online data backup provider, you can easily meet those requirements without putting more stress on your current resources.
Today, we'll talk about your data backup plan. HIPAA requires you to establish and implement procedures to create and maintain retrievable exact copies of electronic protected health information. In other words, you are required to have a data backup plan, and to backup HIPAA data offsite. We suggest that you look for the following features when you're shopping for a data backup provider:
- Backups and restores should be fully-automated. This eliminates the need for manual data handling.
- The service should be easy to use, without adding to the workload of your current staff.
- The backup process should take place throughout the day, without interrupting your operations. Ideally, continuous data protection should be available, with backups occurring every 15 minutes, 24/7/365.
- Data should be backed up to two geographically separate Class A data centers, preferably thousands of miles apart and distinctly different in terms of geographic risk.
- For additional security and convenience, as well as improved business continuity, you should consider a service that provides an onsite, virtualized NAS device. A virtualized NAS device can function as a failover server in the event of a local server failure or data corruption, and will minimize your downtime when you experience an equipment failure.
To see how Granite Mountain compares to other data backup and disaster recovery vendors, visit the comparison chart at Compare Online Backup. Then complete our Fast Quote Form or call us at 877-562-0333 ext. 265 to find out how we can support your HIPAA compliance efforts.
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