Carbonite Business Helps Healthcare Organizations Comply With HIPAA

For businesses in the healthcare industry, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates safeguards that must be in place to ensure appropriate protection of stored personal health information.

Carbonite, Inc., provider of online backup solutions for consumers and SMBs, has added features to Carbonite Business to help with HIPAA compliance.

A critical aspect of HIPAA regulations is data protection, requiring compliant backup methods to ensure the security and confidentiality of stored data.

A survey of small business decision makers in the medical field (Carbonite Small Business Attitude and Usage Study, August 2011) indicated that 68% are either responsible for their businesses’ data backup themselves or assign an employee to manage the backup process.

Internal management of this business task suggests these offices would benefit from a backup solution that is easy to implement and maintain, and ensures stored data is managed with appropriate security measures to guard against unauthorized access.

Carbonite Business solutions deliver an easy to install and use service, and backup an unlimited number of computers, external hard drives, NAS devices and Windows servers for a low flat fee – all while ensuring compliance with critical HIPAA compliance requirements.

"Covered entities in the medical, dental and healthcare fields governed by HIPAA need an online backup solution that does not expose them to non-compliance penalties that could jeopardize their practice, business and reputation," said Pete Lamson, SVP of Small Business, Carbonite. "Carbonite Business helps ensure that organizations have their stored data securely available when they need it – a key component of being HIPAA compliant."

Carbonite Business provides data security protection
and can help assist small businesses
with compliance efforts, including:

• Encryption: All data sent to Carbonite servers is encrypted before being transmitted to Carbonite’s data centers over an SSL connection, and all data remains encrypted in secure data centers.
• Offsite backup for DR: Carbonite online backup is a component in any disaster contingency plan as protection against hardware failure, theft, virus attack, deletion and natural disaster.
• Private Encryption Key Management: Carbonite Business added technical policies and procedures that allow only authorized persons to access stored data through the use of a Private Encryption Key so that no one – not even the Carbonite technical support staff – has access to stored data. By choosing this option, stored files cannot be decrypted without the customers’ unique encryption key.
• Secure data centers: Carbonite’s data centers are physically secured with protective measures that restrict access using biometric scanners, electronic key cards and PIN codes, and are guarded by onsite security officers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Starting at $229 per year, Carbonite offers a reliable and continuous service for small healthcare businesses to backup their business data. Carbonite Business backups an unlimited number of computers, as well as external hard drives and NAS devices, for a predictable fee with 250GB of storage included. Carbonite Business Premier backups an unlimited number of computers and Windows servers with 500GB of storage included. Businesses can add supplemental storage packs should their storage needs surpass the GBs provided with their selected plans.

HIPPA fact sheet