In July 2024, the global CloudStrike outage disrupted all industries, particularly healthcare, revealing the risks of relying on a single cloud provider. Healthcare providers faced delays in accessing patient data and treatment. This article examines the outage’s impact on healthcare and how our Health Hybrid Cloud framework can mitigate such issues by enhancing resilience and availability.
A recent CloudStrike outage struck over 8.5 million Windows devices across industries worldwide.1 The event not only impacted access to important cybersecurity protections, but also exposed wider operational considerations linked to the reliance on third-party services. Businesses heavily dependent on Microsoft’s services encountered immediate obstacles in upholding their security postures and continuing operations seamlessly when using CrowdStrike’s Falcon systems. A software update gone awry caused widespread disruptions, grounding flights, halting broadcasters, and impacting services across multiple sectors, including healthcare. Hospitals and healthcare facilities faced immediate consequences as they struggled to access vital patient information online, resulting in delayed treatments and procedures, impacting patient safety and hospital financials.
In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) systems were severely affected, leaving doctors and caregivers unable to access blood tests, patient histories, or scans. In the US, renowned institutions such as New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Boston’s Mass General Brigham faced similar issues, warning patients of potential delays. Call centers, patient portals, and other critical operations were disrupted, leading to canceled procedures and clinic closures. The outage even affected emergency services, with 911 systems down in New York and New Hampshire.2
The CloudStrike incident loudly communicated the criticality of resilient and highly available cloud solutions in healthcare. It taught us that cyber-resilience is no longer an option, but a necessity to tackle the unexpected disruptions in today’s uncertain digital landscape. The factors making resilience an indisputable requirement are:
Patient safety: Healthcare organizations house sensitive patient information, including medical records and treatment files. A breach of health data through a cyberattack can risk patient privacy and safety. If any such incident results in corrupting the medical records, then patient treatment could be compromised.
Regulatory compliance: Adherence to regulatory requirements such as HIPAA in the US and GDPR in Europe is crucial for healthcare entities in protecting patient information. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in penalties and legal repercussions.
Operational continuity: Healthcare operations are highly dependent on digital systems for patient care, appointments, invoicing, and correspondence. A cyberattack or an outage can hinder vital services, resulting in delays in treatment, appointment cancellation, and even financial losses. Resilience and high availability ensure an organization can sustain critical operations in the event of an incident or temporary system failure.
Reputation management: The survival of healthcare organizations depends on the trust of their patients and the community. A cyber incident can damage the organization’s reputation and along with it, the community’s trust in the organization. If patients feel their personal information is at risk or compromised, they may opt out, affecting the organization's income as well.
Financial consequences: A major cyber incident or outage can result in high remediation costs such as fines, legal fees, system restoration expenses, and compensations to customers. Building resilience and high availability in hospital IT systems can help minimize financial risks in the case of an incident.
The Health Hybrid Cloud (HHC) is uniquely designed to address the needs of high availability and resilience in healthcare. It helps healthcare organizations withstand and quickly recover from an incident. Some of the prominent features of HHC that empower healthcare organizations against cyber risks and downtime are:
Delivering cloud-based Electronic Health Records (HER) and ancillary applications from a secure and compliant platform is crucial. The HHC framework ensures that all data is stored and processed according to the required regulations, giving confidence to healthcare organizations and their patients.
The focus is on data sovereignty, ensuring that healthcare organizations maintain full control over patient data, while adhering to local and global regulations. This is particularly important for compliance with standards such as GDPR in Europe.
The twin-core data center designed for healthcare streamlines disaster recovery and business continuity. It ensures uninterrupted service with fail-safe switchovers, comprehensive backups, and geographic redundancy, keeping healthcare services running even during major outages.
The HHC reduces expenses by moving CapEx to OpEx models, providing visibility into consumption and assessing the best-fit hosting model for EHR and ancillary applications. Healthcare organizations can ensure better resilience and availability by optimizing systems hosted in a mix of environments and avoiding dependence on just one.
The HHC not only hosts EHR systems, but also allows easy integration of third-party apps and services, fostering innovation and interoperability. This ensures healthcare institutions can continuously improve their services with the latest technologies, while keeping security and compliance intact.
The HHC uses advanced encryption protocols to protect patient data and block unauthorized access, ensuring that all information stays confidential and secure.
By utilizing a hybrid approach, the HHC prevents over-dependence on a single provider, enabling an optimal mix of on-premise, private, and public cloud environments tailored to the needs and strategy of the health organization. This arrangement increases resilience, allowing a backup service to seamlessly take over in case of any contingency.
The CloudStrike outage alerted the healthcare sector to the necessity of strong, durable cloud options. T-Systems’ Health Hybrid Cloud framework provides a full solution tailored to the specific requirements of healthcare organizations. The HHC boosts resilience and availability by maximizing cost efficiency, maintaining compliance, and offering strong disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.
1 Helping our customers through the CrowdStrike outage, 2024, Microsoft
2 Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage news, 2024, Min
