Japanese Red Cross Maebashi Hospital strengthens ransomware defense and response with Cohesity and Cisco

Japanese Red Cross Maebashi Hospital needs to minimize disruption to medical care and operations during ransomware attacks. The hospital strengthened its security posture and resilience by integrating Cohesity DataProtect and Cisco XDR. In the event of a cyberattack, clean data can be quickly restored from Cohesity`s clean backups. When Cisco XDR detects a cyber event, the Cohesity solution immediately creates a backup, enabling incident manager uses to assess the incident situation and plan an effective response.

The Challenge

As the only advanced emergency center serving in Gunma, Japanese Red Cross Maebashi Hospital has a responsibility to continue providing medical care during a ransomware attack or other disaster. “Since around 2021, a series of cyberattacks forced other hospitals to suspend medical treatment, which highlighted the risks, and we recognized the need to enhance our resilience,” said Dr. Nakano.

The attacks prompted the hospital to conduct an in-depth review of its security posture, including ransomware protection. "Ransomware attacks are becoming more sophisticated, and with the rise of RaaS (ransomware-as-a-service) the number of attackers is increasing ,” says Mr. Ichinei. “We concluded that the hospital urgently needed ransomware protections.” Backups alone are not sufficient to provide resilience because attackers often encrypt backups in addition to production systems.

The Solution

Maebashi Hospital strengthened its security posture by pairing Cohesity and Cisco XDR. The two solutions complement each other. Cohesity creates immutable backups for restoring clean data after an attack, and uses AI to detect signs of malware in backup data. Cisco XDR is a cloud-based platform, detects malware in other types of data, such as networks endpoints, and automates the response. 

The hospital learned about Cohesity from other Japanese hospitals. "Cohesity backups are immutable, meaning that they cannot be modified for any reason,” says Mr. Ichinei. “They can also be restored quickly. Another Red Cross hospital told us that with Cohesity they restored access to 500 GiB of data in 20 seconds, and fully restored the data in 15 minutes.”

Combining Cohesity and Cisco XDR provides even stronger ransomware protections. “Like Cohesity’s solution, Cisco XDR is an effective countermeasure against ransomware,” Mr. Ichinei says. “Cisco XDR uses AI to automatically perform investigations such as log analysis, verification, risk scoring, and suggestions for appropriate countermeasures. Automated, AI-based analysis strengthens security without increasing work for our staff.”

The hospital is gradually applying Cohesity DataProtect to systems, starting with the network management system. Cohesity software runs on Cisco UCS, which means the IT team can start with the resources needed today and scale easily by adding nodes. “In the future we aim to use Cohesity as the backup for all of our systems,” says Mr. Ichinei.

The Result

Pairing Cohesity with Cisco XDR helps the hospital minimize disruption to patient care after ransomware attacks. “When Cisco XDR detects an incident, Cohesity DataProtect immediately creates a backup. We can quickly restore clean data using an immutable Cohesity backup taken before the incident. This enables the incident manager to assess the scope and begin root cause analysis,” said Mr. Ichinei.

IT staff appreciate the simplicity of managing backups with Cohesity. From a single interface they can manage backups, restores, and cloning. Its powerful deduplication and compression features, combined with a cost-effective licensing model, also supported adoption.

“Even with multiple layers of security, ransomware damage continues to occur. That`s why we believe resilience-focused solutions like Cohesity and Cisco XDR are essential – and this is shared by our leadership,” says Dr. Nakano. Now Maebashi Hospital plans to continue strengthening its security with Cohesity and is sharing its positive experiences and insights with other hospitals to the overall improvement of cybersecurity in the healthcare industry. 

Key Benefits:

• Allows rapid restoration of clean data
• Provides cyber resilience needed to continue providing medical care during disasters
• Enhanced incident response capabilities
• Reduces stress during incident response
• Simplifies management and reduces capacity and licensing costs

About Japanese Red Cross Maebashi Hospital

Since its founding in 1913, Japanese Red Cross Maebashi Hospital continually evolves to meet new needs, striving to remain a modern and innovative institution. Today the hospital is designated as a core disaster base hospital, advanced emergency medical center, regional medical support hospital, regional cancer treatment coordination hospital, doctor helicopter base, higher brain dysfunction support center, regional perinatal maternal and child medical center, and AIDS treatment base hospital.