Availity’s Rapid Recovery

Executive Summary

Healthcare has become the most targeted sector for ransomware attacks—and the most vulnerable. With attackers now aiming at critical infrastructure like clearinghouses, the stakes have never been higher.

Despite this shift, many organizations still rely on outdated prevention-only strategies. But today, prevention alone is no longer enough. Cyberattacks are all but guaranteed. The difference between catastrophic disruption and business continuity lies in how fast an organization can recover.

Healthcare leaders must evolve their cybersecurity playbooks and demand more from vendors, including shorter recovery timelines, validated contingency plans, and real world testing that ensures operational resilience—not just regulatory compliance.

In this white paper, we explore:

• Why prevention-only strategies fail in today’s threat environment.
• How recovery speed is now a core business metric.
• What questions to ask vendors to assess their true resilience.
• How Availity’s Rapid Recovery sets a new benchmark with independently validated five-day recovery time.

When Recovery Fails, the Healthcare System Fails

When a breach occurs, the true cost goes far beyond IT.

From missed appointments to unpaid claims and from delayed prescriptions to damaged reputations, cyberattacks impact operations, finance, and services—for patients,
providers, and payers alike.

The traditional recovery process itself can be slow and painful:

1. Systems go offline—often for weeks.
2. Forensic teams must search for vulnerabilities.
3. Data integrity is verified and restored.
4. New environments are tested and rebuilt.
5. Third-party attestations are required before go-live.

That’s assuming you have a recovery plan at all. Most organizations rely on a third-party software vendor. If your vendor’s plan is weak, your operations fail too.

Vendor Evaluation Guide: 5 Questions Every Vendor Must Answer Before You Sign

In the wake of healthcare’s most disruptive cyberattacks, vendor vetting can’t focus only on features or compliance certifications. You need to know: Can this partner get my organization back online—fast?

1. What is your recovery time after a cyberattack? If they can’t commit to a specific timeline, they’re not ready.
2. How do you ensure your backups are secure and immutable? Ask if they use air-gapped or physically isolated systems that ransomware can’t touch.
3. Do you run real breach simulations—or just tabletop exercises? Practice makes you prepared. Look for vendors who stress-test their recovery plans in live scenarios.
4. Can you maintain communication during a total outage? Clear, redundant communications are critical to coordinating recovery across stakeholders.
5. Do you offer third-party validation of your recovery capabilities? Independent audits ensure you’re not just taking their word for it.

Some vendors and clearinghouses do the bare minimum, following only what’s required to stay compliant. For instance, if vendors only perform breach assessments after an incident or annually—or never—that’s unacceptable.

It’s important to find a vendor who does more than the minimum by providing protection, detection, and recovery. When considering potential technology vendors, pay attention to the following red flags:

• Reliance on compliance certifications without real recovery capabilities, because compliance alone is proving inadequate.
• Slow recovery timelines, which mean delays in care and lost revenue.
• Lack of real-world testing—leaving organizations vulnerable to significant disruption.
• No independent validation, which ensures necessary protection and verifies recovery plans.

In an industry where downtime costs millions—and impacts lives—your vendor’s resilience is your resilience. It’s more important than ever to choose wisely.

Conclusion – The New Cybersecurity Playbook

The old cybersecurity strategy—build stronger walls and hope they hold—is no longer viable.

Instead, a three-pronged approach of prevention, detection, and recovery must become the standard for the industry. Traditional recovery models are reactive and take weeks to recover if not longer. But a proactive approach accelerates recovery and gives organizations more protection—helping thwart attacks before they happen.

With cyberattacks increasingly inevitable, the only question is how prepared you are to recover when—not if—your systems go down. That means shifting the playbook:

• From prevention-only to prevention plus rapid recovery.
• From vendor trust to vendor verification.
• From reactive responses to resilience by design.

Your technology vendors aren’t just vendors, they’re digital lifelines. If they fail to recover, your organization fails too.

With recovery time increasingly critical to operations, choosing a third-party vendor takes on even more importance. Vendors who provide cybersecurity to organizations and their partner vendors should consistently and thoroughly test for resilience against cyberattacks.

That’s why Availity® created Rapid Recovery—a new standard for business continuity in healthcare. With a five-day recovery guarantee, independent validation, and hardened infrastructure inspired by military and financial systems, Availity is leading the way in making recovery speed a measurable, contractual promise—not an aspiration.

5 Takeaways from the 2024 Healthcare Data Breach

The 2024 healthcare cyber attack involving Change Healthcare was a wake-up call, exposing critical vulnerabilities in handling sensitive data. Simply put, it was the most significant and consequential cyberattack in the history of U.S. health care to date. Just over one year later, the industry continues to learn valuable lessons to bolster its defenses and improve response strategies.