Hospital boosts cyber resilience and complies with business continuity planning requirements with solution from Cohesity and HPE

The Japanese government requires that hospitals have a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) to quickly restore operations following ransomware attacks or other disasters. Japanese Red Cross Musashino Hospital decided to create an integrated backup environment for key patient and operational data— separate from the backups managed by individual departments. The hospital found its solution in Cohesity DataProtect on HPE ProLiant servers. During a BCP training exercise, the hospital recovered access to 500 GB of data in 20 seconds.

The Challenge

A 611-bed acute care facility, Japanese Red Cross Musashino Hospital serves a region with a population of approximately 1 million. Like hospitals everywhere, Japanese hospitals have been subject to ransomware attacks that disrupted patient care for weeks or months. To limit disruption, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare now requires that hospitals have a BCP. “In light of the damage suffered by medical institutions, the need to further strengthen our countermeasures was essential,” says Kenjiro Okada, medical information management section chief for the hospital.

A leader in healthcare IT, Japanese Red Cross Musashino Hospital already had strong cyber defenses, including an endpoint detection and response (EDR) system and a security operations center to detect and respond to potential threats. As part of BCP, the hospital also needed cyber resilience—the ability to quickly restore servers and data in the event of a successful cyberattack. “In addition to backing up each business system individually, our hospital wanted an integrated backup environment that would allow for rapid recovery of servers and data needed for patient care and essential hospital operations,” Okada says. Criteria for the new solution included reliability, data security, rapid recovery, and efficient use of storage resources.

The Solution

After comparing leading data protection solutions and conducting a proof of concept, Japanese Red Cross Musashino Hospital selected Cohesity DataProtect on HPE ProLiant servers. “We liked Cohesity for its fast recovery speed and unlimited capacity,” Okada says. “The other solutions had limits to the amount of data that could be restored.” The Cohesity solution also stood apart for its data security, including immutable backups and AI-based detection of threats in backup data.

Today, the hospital backs up more than 100 TB of vital patient and operational data from 27 department systems running on more than 80 servers is protected by the Cohesity solution. This data includes the electronic medical record (EMR) system, medical accounting systems and certain lab, dispensing, and imaging systems. In the event of an attack, the IT team can use the Cohesity solution to restore large numbers of virtual machines and databases to any snapshot point in time, minimizing disruption to patient care and hospital operations.

The Result

The hospital’s annual BCP drill against cyber attacks assumes an attack is underway, and staff respond just as they would in an actual emergency. “During the BCP training exercise, our staff recovered access to 500 GB of data in just 20 seconds with Cohesity,” Okada says. “Total time for the whole process was just 15 minutes. In our environment, recovery time does not change even if the number of servers or their capacity increases. For a medical information system that requires recovery as quickly as possible, this is a significant advantage.” Even the EMR system, which contains unstructured data such as lab results and medical images, access to data can be restored in about 20 seconds.

Hospital IT staff can now recover lost or corrupted data or files without help from a vendor because the Cohesity management interface is easy to use. “If we had to call a vendor every time a problem occurred, it would delay our response time,” Okada says. “I tried the restoration myself and was surprised at how little time it took.”

Another benefit was that backup capacity requirements dropped by up to 70%, a result of Cohesity’s deduplication and compression.

Now the hospital is starting to use the Cohesity solution in other ways, increasing the value of the investment. One plan is backing up a next-gen EMR system that consists of multiple servers. “With Cohesity, we hope to resume operations within 24 hours after the BCP is activated,” Okada says. The hospital also plans to use Cohesity to archive data in the cloud so that it can be shared with other Red Cross hospitals.

“Protecting against cyberattacks, including ransomware, is an extremely important issue for medical institutions,” Okada says. “With Cohesity AI-powered data security on HPE ProLiant servers, we have an environment that allows us to quickly restore medical operations in the event of a cyberattack.”

Key Benefits:

• 20 seconds to recover access to 500 GB of data
• Consistent recovery times across the environment
• Performing restores to any point in time with ease
• Up to 70% capacity savings

About Japanese Red Cross Musashino Hospital

Established in 1949, Japanese Red Cross Musashino Hospital provides cancer treatment, maternal and children’s care, tertiary emergency services, a stroke center, liver disease treatment, and more. The hospital handles more than 11,000 ambulance transports per year, playing an important role in supporting acute care in the region.