Optimizing disaster recovery for healthcare IT environments

Disaster recovery (DR) in healthcare is far from a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. Your DR system must flex as your environment risk changes. You should also evolve it using principles of continuous improvement.

But achieving deep resilience by optimizing disaster recovery can be complicated. To simplify things, here’s a guide that breaks down:

• Core principles of DR in healthcare
• A systematic approach to optimizing your disaster recovery
• The role that Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can play in your DR optimization

The core concepts that drive disaster recovery in healthcare

First, we need to establish a common vocabulary around disaster recovery. Here are the primary concepts that every healthcare DR solution depends on:

• Disaster recovery (DR): This is the ability to recover data and restore IT systems after an outage, natural disaster, or cyber attack.
• Recovery time objective (RTO): Your RTO refers to how quickly you need to restore your IT systems.
• Recovery point objective (RPO): Your RPO dictates how much data you can lose without having a detrimental effect on operations.
• Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS): DRaaS is a service for healthcare cloud solutions that automatically replicates essential data, triggers manual failover with validation, and recovers your systems in the wake of an incident.
• Cyber resilience: Cyber resilience refers to how well you can continue to provide clinical continuity even when a disaster impacts your system. It can also refer to how well you can maintain support functions, such as billing and scheduling, during or immediately after a disaster.

Your step-by-step approach to optimizing healthcare disaster recovery

If you’re not 100% confident in your DR solution, no problem. You can use this step-by-step guide as a high-level checklist to make sure it’s ready to support your resilience.

Establish a dependable baseline

Your first step is to ensure your most important systems are regularly backed up. This involves having backups of both the applications and their data.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Your app data has to be backed up frequently. Backing up app data once a week may not be enough. Restoring a backup shouldn’t force you to settle for days-old data.
• Every business- and care-critical app needs backups—including those in the cloud. Never assume having data in the cloud is “backed up by default.”

When building your backup baseline, it helps to take the time to list out all of your apps. It’s often easiest to do this using categories such as:

• Electronic health records (EHRs)
• Picture archiving and communications system (PACS)
• Lab systems
• Billing
• Apps used by IoT devices, such as biometric monitors

Classify your systems according to how critical they are

Some systems need to be recovered right away, while others aren’t under a stringent time crunch. Start by categorizing which systems are the most time-sensitive using the following table:

Automate your backups and failover

When dealing with healthcare cloud solutions, it’s best to automate as much of your DR as possible. Manual recovery takes a lot of time and increases the risk of human error impacting a smooth, timely recovery.

Automation needs to be a part of your:

• Backup system. Your disaster recovery tools should automatically back up essential apps on a regular basis, without the need for any human intervention.
• Failover mechanism. Failover should be automatic and follow carefully prescribed rules. You shouldn’t even require admin credentials to initiate failover.

What is failover?

A system equipped with failover has a primary site and a backup site, and it can switch workloads from the primary site to the failover site automatically when the system’s state meets pre-determined conditions.

A strong failover strategy doesn’t just sit in the background; it quietly powers confidence. By continuously replicating data from your primary site to a geographically separate failover environment, you ensure that when disruption strikes, clinicians can stay focused on care, not systems. When activated, the failover environment delivers the same (or nearly the same) data clinicians rely on in the primary system, keeping workflows moving even in the middle of chaos.

Picture this: You’re supporting a busy hospital running Epic in a data center 25 miles north. Workstations across the hospital connect to Epic over the network. Meanwhile, your failover site—strategically positioned 50 miles south—hosts an alternate Epic production environment that’s always up to date thanks to continuous data replication.

You’ve also defined clear criteria for when to initiate a manual Epic disaster recovery failover, ensuring no one is guessing in the heat of an outage. During an unexpected disruption, clinicians immediately pivot to downtime workflows such as Epic Isolated recovery environment, Business Continuity Access, or even paper documentation while IT teams rapidly assess the situation. If that outage is deemed prolonged, leadership may officially declare a disaster and launch the failover Epic environment.

Once live, users simply log into the alternate production system and jump back into electronic workflows—supported by the most current replicated data available. The result? A resilient, reliable experience that keeps clinicians confident and care continuous, even when the unexpected hits.

Of course, you can set stricter failover rules. But these could result in higher data usage costs at the failover site, which would be a consideration decision-makers would have to weigh.

Harden your system against cyber threats

Hardening your DR system against cyber threats involves protecting the assets and systems that attackers may target.

If a hacker can’t corrupt or damage your DR assets, you may be able to recover from a ransomware attack in minutes—or less. But if they can penetrate your DR defenses, they could disable disaster recovery and then launch an attack that could cripple your primary system.

Hardening against attackers involves:

• Establishing immutable backups. An immutable backup is one that can’t be deleted, changed, or encrypted. Your database’s settings make these actions impossible—even by system admins—for a set period of time.
• Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA). All data inside a backup should be protected by MFA, so an attacker needs more than a username and password to access it.
• Deploying strict role-based permissions. For example, you can only allow certain admins (such as those who work for your DRaaS provider) to access backups.
• Air gap your backups. An air gap is a separation, either physical or digital, that segments your backup away from your primary system. Air gapping can prevent an attacker from moving laterally from your primary to your backup system.

You can also harden your DR system using a firewall that prevents access from certain geographic regions or from specific IP addresses. The firewall can work as a logical air gap for your DR solution. For many organizations, a physical airgap is preferable, even if you have a firewall, because it drastically reduces the risk of automated, lateral, digital movement from your primary to your backup system.

Continuously test your disaster recovery solution

Testing your DR typically involves:

• Scheduling tests in a way that minimizes interruption to normal operations. For example, you can test a failover system for an imaging app by shutting off power to your primary app for a few minutes at 3:00 a.m. when the demand for imaging is minimal.
• Including clinical staff, such as doctors and nurses. At a minimum, they need to be made aware of the test and be asked for feedback regarding how well it restored their ability to provide care.
• Measuring success using pre-defined metrics. Some common metrics include stats around RTO and RPO.

Continuously improve your DR

Continuous improvement requires constant evaluation of your DR performance and how it aligns with the requirements of your app stack. Some considerations include:

• Recovery times, which should improve as you fine-tune your DR.
• Meeting recovery point objectives, especially after you add or update a patient-critical app.
• Adjusting system tiers. If, for example, local regulations require patients to be processed through an insurance system prior to receiving care, your insurance management and billing apps may have to move to Tier 1.
• Adding automation when safe and practical. Every step you can automate can save precious moments during a disaster.

The critical role of DRaaS in healthcare

DRaaS can remove much of the heavy lifting as you build an effective DR system because you get the support and knowledge of experienced DR professionals. Instead of building and maintaining your own data center for disaster recovery, you can rely on your DRaaS solution to set it up and support it for you. RapidScale’s DRaaS gives you scalable recovery and built-in automation. It also makes sure your DR solution is compliant with all applicable regulations.

Send our team a message today to see how RapidScale can help optimize your disaster recovery.