Staying informed of the latest data privacy regulations as they apply to healthcare can be challenging. Not only are there a plethora of different security and retention requirements, but the risk of failure is higher than in any other sector:
- Ransomware attacks on healthcare providers rose 350% in Q4 2019, with 91% stemming from phishing exploits.
- Healthcare accounted for 51% of data breaches in Q1 2020, likely fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and users working from home through less secure networks.
- A quick survey of the news just in the first week of June found victims of data breaches as diverse as the University of Utah Health, the University of California, San Francisco, the Mille Lacs Health System, and Aveanna Healthcare.
- Hackers have been taking advantage of pandemic fears by impersonating Google-branded sites, the World Health Organization, the National Health Service, and other regulatory bodies.
- 86% of healthcare covered entities don’t use scanning and filtering tools on their email platforms.
- Health services and medical groups are the most at risk.
Not only is the risk of failure higher, so is the cost of failure. According to the Ponemon Institute, healthcare organizations have paid the highest costs due to data breaches at an average of $429 per record, or $6.5 million each year; in addition, the healthcare sector pays higher costs in the second and third years than other sectors.
The cost of healthcare data breaches was also reported to vary by organization size, with small- to medium-sized organizations spending 5 percent of annual revenue, or $2.5 million, to recover. However, organizations that detected and contained the breach in less than 200 days spent $1.2 million less on total breach costs.
Whether you use Office 365, Microsoft Exchange, or any other on-premise or cloud-hosted email service, you must proactively protect your organization – and your patients -- from viruses, spam, phishing attacks, spyware, and other types of unwanted and harmful email. Here are three ways MDaemon Technologies’ Security Gateway for Email offers comprehensive, multi-layered data protection to healthcare organizations.
1. Threat Protection
Security Gateway covers both internal and external threats; for example:
- Account hijack protection detects any hijacked local account and automatically prevents it from sending messages through your server.
- Dynamic screening tracks the behavior of incoming connections to identify suspicious activity and respond quickly using parameters you’ve created.
- Outbreak protection analyzes the patterns associated with email transmission and proactively protects your email infrastructure from the latest spam and virus outbreaks automatically and in real time.
In addition, Security Gateway’s logs and reports provide an at-a-glance overview of email traffic, as well as antivirus and anti-spam activity.
2. Compliance Tools
Security Gateway also includes built-in archiving and data retention policies, plus legal hold, to help businesses meet evolving data retention laws. It’s simple to set up and can help your organization avoid the headaches, costs and loss of business from HIPAA and HITECH regulatory violations as well as data breaches.
3. Data “Quarantine”
Remember that statistic above where organizations that caught security breaches earlier paid half as much in recovery costs? A small investment in additional email security and compliance up front can help your organization avoid much costlier losses later. Security Gateway’s Data Leak Prevention feature is particularly effective against the loss of PHI and other confidential business data that may be transmitted in email leaving your organization. Messages containing sensitive data can be encrypted or sent into administrative quarantine for further review.
Get a Better Gateway for Healthcare Email
If you’re ready to start protecting your healthcare organization against expensive and damaging regulatory violations and data leaks, sign up for a free trial of Security Gateway for Email. If you have questions, leave us a comment or click here to contact us by phone or email.
