In May this year, two New York City hospitals — New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center — were slammed with a whopping $4.8 million fine from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the biggest HIPAA fine in U.S. history. The hospitals were fined for failing to protect patient information under HIPAA privacy laws due to an incident in 2010 when the electronic health data of 6,800 patients were made public on the Internet. According to the HHS investigation, the incident unfolded because a Columbia faculty member attempted to deactivate a personally owned service that was connected to the hospital's network where the patient data resided.

To help organizations better understand the challenges of backup, disaster recovery and secure access, Acronis has created the "8 Noble Truths" of data protection. To view all 8 Noble Truths, please download the whitepaper. This is the sixth post in an eight-part series to help you protect your data:

The twin pressures of increasing data volume and complexity are the primary data protection challenges for small- and medium-sized IT departments today, according to new research from IDC and Acronis. With more and more data to protect, on more devices and in physical, cloud, virtual and mobile environments, data protection is more challenging than ever.

Backing up data may seem like a hassle, but it's important — especially when it comes to recovering data that could otherwise be lost. Thinking about linking a device to a computer or waiting while it syncs with the cloud seems like a productivity killer but, in fact, it could be a productivity saver.