Why HITRUST CSF Certification Should Factor into Your Selection of a Cloud Fax Provider

If your company is a covered entity or business associate in the healthcare industry, you know the ever-growing threat that cybercriminals pose to your patients’ data—and to your company’s HIPAA compliance.

To cite just one example, according to a study reported in HealthCare IT Security, 93% of healthcare organizations suffered a data breach in the last three years. Worse, the same study found that 96% of healthcare security professionals believe their organizations are not technologically equipped to keep pace with hackers’ increasing numbers and sophistication.

Cybercrime Is Evolving, and Your Cybersecurity Needs to Evolve With it

Question: If cybercriminals are becoming more numerous and their methods more advanced, can you afford to allow any aspect of your company’s cybersecurity to remain static?

We believe the answer is clearly no. This is why when selecting any digital service your employees will be using to handle patients’ data—including a cloud fax solution—you should search only for vendors that are working continuously to stay ahead of these risks.

HITRUST CSF^® Certification Demonstrates Your Vendor Is Always Working to Prevent the Next Threat

For healthcare entities like yours, one way to find the technology services that are best equipped to deal with cyber threats is to look for those built by companies that have earned HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF) certification.

As we’ve noted previously here on the eFax Corporate^® blog, HITRUST CSF certification is considered the gold-standard framework for compliance and security in healthcare IT.

This is partly because the framework incorporates key elements of internationally accepted data standards, such as those from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the agency whose security guidelines the US Department of Defense follows for protecting its own data. HITRUST CSF also incorporates the major elements of the most stringent data standards such as PCI, ISO, HITECH and, most relevant here, HIPAA.

But there is another reason HITRUST CSF certification has gained such credibility among healthcare entities and payers. (According to Healthcare Weekly, more than 90 healthcare insurers now require their partners to become HITRUST certified.)

These payers understand that electronic protected health information (ePHI) is among the most attractive types of data to cybercriminals. They know that hackers grow in number each year and that they keep finding creative new ways to attack the networks of covered entities and business associates. And they know that most technology vendors aren’t able to keep up with these security threats.

An important benefit of the HITRUST framework is that is flexible and always evolving to meet new challenges. To attain this certification, an organization must show that its technology and practices are able to quickly adapt to new threats and overcome them.

With that in mind, among all of the other reasons to look only for solutions backed by HITRUST-certified companies, the most important might be this:

HITRUST CSF certification demonstrates the vendor is continually evolving and updating its technology to deal with changes in both healthcare regulations and cybercriminals’ behavior.

The First Major Cloud Fax Provider to Earn HITRUST CSF Certification

Considering how many faxes your organization likely sends and receives—and how many of those contain ePHI—you can see why HIPAA compliance and security should be among your top priorities when selecting the right cloud fax solution.

That should make the decision easy, because eFax Corporate is the first major cloud fax provider to earn HITRUST CSF certification.

Our enterprise-caliber Digital Cloud Fax Technology (DCFT) solutions have been protecting healthcare organizations’ highly sensitive and regulated data for more than 20 years. Attaining this new HITRUST certification is only our most recent demonstration of eFax Corporate’s commitment to provide the most secure, HIPAA-compliant cloud fax platform for covered entities like yours.