Jenny Bristow and Senior Digital Producer Suzie Schmitt of Hedy & Hopp discuss the pervasive, yet often misunderstood, risks of tech dependencies for healthcare marketers. They explain what happens when single points of failure like AWS and Cloudflare experience outages, examine the instability of the internet's open-source foundation, and explain why these issues uniquely impact healthcare organizations. Learn actionable steps to create, document, and execute a disaster plan to mitigate operational and compliance risks.

Episode notes:

Understanding Tech Dependency Risks: How the internet's "Jenga tower" of dependencies creates massive ripple effects from a single break

Cloud Monopolies and Backup Strategy: The risk of relying on three major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and the need to have your website backup on a separate infrastructure from your production environment

The Open-Source Developer Issue: The unsustainability of large enterprises depending on unpaid, volunteer open-source developers

Cloudflare Explained: How this intermediary service facilitates a secure and faster internet, and what happens when it fails

The Responsibility of Covered Entities: The HIPAA breach notification clock starts when an outage occurs, so it’s important to clearly document the timeline of events

Creating a Disaster Plan and Crisis Communication Strategy: The necessity of defining roles and establishing a communication plan for an inevitable failure

Documenting Dependencies: Steps to list and track all dependencies so that you can quickly assess if an outage impacts your website

Marketing's Role in Security: Why outage communication falls to the marketing team and the need for close alignment with IT on the disaster plan

Connect with Jenny:

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

Connect with Suzie:

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzie-schmitt/ 

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