Data breaches continue to plague the healthcare sector, as the size and scope of hackers' efforts to compromise sensitive information paint a picture of an industry far behind where it needs to be. As healthcare organizations struggle to ramp up their technology use while coping with its consequences, many lack preventative measures and secure technologies that can offer adequate safeguards. Cloud-based faxing is part of a preventative framework that addresses daily healthcare information security needs. It provides a more protected, manageable and malleable environment for organizations that are in sore need of rapid improvement.
The latest spate of healthcare data breaches includes a few that combine old-school theft with Internet cybercrime. Records stored on laptops, flash drives and in paper forms represent an increasingly lucrative opportunity for criminals, who have an open market for selling or disseminating swiped patient records. This hybrid model of record-snatching is compounding the impact of a February break-in at an office of Sutherland Healthcare Solutions, a medical billing company. Recently, Los Angeles County officials discovered that 170,200 additional people had records stolen, bringing the total number of patients with compromised information to 338,700, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Updating technological platforms is key to combating advanced persistent threats. A cloud-based faxing model offers better physical security and digital protection, a comprehensive model that today's healthcare organizations need to keep pace with new hazards. As Dark Reading contributor Kelly Jackson Higgins pointed out, merely putting up barriers to hackers from health data isn't enough to avoid breaches. An organization needs to have a well-rounded security approach that addresses every way a criminal could potentially enter an organization's environment – as well as target every way out. Cloud-based faxing provides a more protected method to transmit sensitive information, using back-end support and encryption to eliminate any vulnerabilities a cybercriminal could exploit. With multiple customizable layers of security, cloud-based faxing offers the rigorous safeguards that healthcare organizations need to beat today's most dangerous threats.
