This week the CDA Journal published an article from TDIC about the importance of backups. Since then, we have been flooded with calls asking if our backups meet those standards. Not only do we meet those standards, but we exceed them so much that we blow the standards out of the water!
In 2008 we started seeing a change in backups and the standard of care surrounding them. Prior to 2008, the SOC was to have a hard drive, or multiple hard drives that ran a manual backup and were taken off site.
Often times we saw backups that hadn’t actually run for months or years even though the office was doing the process they had been trained to do, or the devices were unencrypted and an enormous liability if they were lost or stolen. Then the Cloud happened and opened up a lot of possibilities.
We have always believed that if your data is important, you back it up in more than one place and in more than one way. Since 2009, there have been increasing rules and regulation with HIPAA surrounding how to properly secure the data on those backups. To address all of these concerns, we offered a multi staged backup. We have an hourly on-site backup that is fully encrypted in both he software and the backup device itself. We also backup your data to the cloud, which is also encrypted with a vendor that is on top of HIPAA compliance and redundancy.
The one thing in the article that was misleading in my opinion, was the story of how Pixar almost lost the film if not for the employee that had a copy at her home. Let me be explicitly clear — this is NOT recommended. Home computers are easily virused and we do not monitor, maintain or support these machines. We cannot help you or protect you from a data breach if you engage in Shadow IT and make unauthorized copies of your data. Remember, we are a team when it comes to properly securing your data. You pay us to handle this and we are always looking at backups and testing to ensure they are up to date and available should a situation arise.
