Business Continuity in a SaaS-Based World

Time is always of the essence in healthcare, whether you are a clinician taking care of patients or an IT professional taking care of clinicians. So, when struck by an outage that knocked our timekeeping system offline, we were in a race against time to ensure our caregivers were compensated at the right time and with the right amount of compensation. As more applications are Software as a Service (SaaS) and vendor-supported, traditional operational practices no longer keep the organization safe from attacks, outages, and disaster situations. Strategies and tactics must shift from exclusively patch management and backup recovery testing to forward-thinking business continuity practices to assess vendors' security and architecture capabilities while creating composable architectures that adapt to changing situations. Composable architectures allow business-focused capabilities to be split into modular components to plug into an overall system framework, allowing for quick replacements in failure events for a component. This talk will address the scale of the outage, solutions of other organizations published in the news, and how we leveraged a composable architecture to create a temporary solution in six days, allowing for relatively seamless continuity of operations.