Dental Associates Stays Compliant and Secure with Disaster Recovery Solutions
Dental Associates uses TierPoint Disaster Recovery and Security Solutions to protect patient data and maintain key compliance standards.
Introduction
Dental Associates, a Wisconsin-wide practice that offers dental care for the whole family, faces many of the same challenges shared by the rest of the healthcare industry. To provide the best care for their patients, the organization can’t compromise on performance, latency, or matters of cybersecurity and compliance.
Challenges
IT infrastructure and Cyber Security concerns keep Dental Associates’ CIO, Bruce Schmidt, “up at night”. While the focus used to be on losing data centers due to natural disasters, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, data breaches, and ransomware attacks have become a more prevalent concern, requiring a higher level of security in recent years.
Performance and latency issues are also of great importance to Dental Associates. They need to be able to take X-rays of their patients and deliver them to healthcare providers to allow for proper diagnosis and treatment.
Without the proper solutions, Dental Associates risks patient confidentiality, HIPAA non-compliance, litigation, revenue, and business reputation.
Solutions
TierPoint has been able to lighten the load through our hosting and data center capabilities, as well as our cybersecurity, data recovery, and CleanIP Extended Detection and Response (XDR) services. Dental Associates’ hosted servers and a rack for custom capabilities are housed at the Milwaukee data center, with a 2nd out of market data center serving as a replication site for added security and redundancy via Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), powered by Zerto.
While TierPoint provides “boots on the ground” data center and server administration, Dental Associates can remotely monitor and maintain their network through the capabilities and services TierPoint offers.
Results
Through TierPoint, Dental Associates can maintain a closed-loop data center solution, with the assurance that patient data and HIPAA-related information is secure.
Dental Associates was an early adopter and beta tester for CleanIP XDR, and the experience has been going well. When asked about it, Bruce Schmidt, CIO of Dental Associates, said, “I feel a sense of security. Every month I get a report from the person that’s reviewing our logs daily that demonstrates what it’s protecting.” The company appreciates the combined effort of artificial intelligence learning their threat landscape paired with human eyes monitoring logs.
TierPoint’s comprehensive services have also filled any gaps in Dental Associates’ internal IT team. VMware and virtual machines are being patched and updated regularly, coinciding with the urgency required to update them. With the daily audits provided by the CleanIP XDR solution, there’s no need for a person on Dental Associates’ staff to perform the task.
“Luckily, through the tools we have in place, we’ve not uncovered anything that has been considered a serious threat.” - Bruce Schmidt, Chief Information Officer at Dental Associates
At A Glance
Industry
Healthcare / Dental Care
Technology
Disaster Recovery as a Service (Powered by Zerto), Clean IP XDR, Multitenant Cloud, Colocation
Challenge
Protect sensitive patient data from cybersecurity vulnerabilities, data breaches, and ransomware, while keeping performance and latency in focus.
Solution
TierPoint’s hosting and data center capabilities, in addition to CleanIP XDR, allow Dental Associates to focus on other IT matters and sleep better at night.
Results
Dental Associates can rest easy knowing that their patient information is HIPAA-compliant, secure, and safe from incoming threats. TierPoint has filled gaps in Dental Associates’ internal IT processes, identified organization-specific threats over time, and provided the added layer of security the business needed to feel comfortable.
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