For Australian medical practices, running safely and efficiently goes beyond just keeping booking systems online or ensuring electronic prescriptions work. It’s about protecting patients’ most sensitive data.
Healthcare has become a prime target for cybercriminals. In 2024–25, 95% of healthcare-related cyber incidents succeeded, compared to 52% in other sectors.
This highlights a critical reality: medical data is highly valuable, and criminals are working harder to access it.
Many practices are turning to Managed Detection and Response (MDR) or Managed Extended Detection and Response (MXDR) for cybersecurity. However, a key detail is often overlooked: data retention periods. Most protection services only offer 14 to 30 days of data history by default, creating a dangerous blind spot.
Threat actors often wait to act once they gain access to a system. This means upgrading to a 365-day (or longer) retention service is a strategic necessity for modern medical cybersecurity.
What is MXDR? A quick guide to the terminology
To understand MXDR, let’s break it down:
- EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response): Protects specific devices like laptops and servers.
- MDR (Managed Detection and Response): EDR delivered as a service, offering threat mitigation and remediation by a dedicated security team.
- XDR (Extended Detection and Response): Goes beyond endpoints, integrating security data from across the organisation to detect hidden threats and streamline response.
- MXDR (Managed Extended Detection and Response): Combines XDR’s capabilities with expert external management, acting as an extension of your IT and security team.
Think of it this way: EDR secures the front door, XDR watches the back gate, windows, and perimeter, while MXDR adds a highly skilled team to monitor and respond to threats. It’s the gold standard for protection today.
As SentinelOne explains, MXDR connects all your security tools – endpoints, networks, cloud – and offers a unified view to quickly detect and respond to threats.
This is especially crucial for industries like healthcare, where data flows through booking systems, clinical software, and cloud storage.
The key to MXDR’s power lies in its ability to remember past activity, ensuring a more effective and holistic threat analysis.
The ‘dwell time’ problem
The biggest misconception in cybersecurity is that a hack happens instantly: A criminal breaks in, steals data, and leaves within minutes.
In reality, sophisticated cyberattacks are often ‘low and slow’, as indicated by the fact that the ACSC detected 39% of ransomware incidents before the organisations themselves were even aware of them.
This highlights a significant visibility gap where attackers may compromise a network and then sit quietly for months, observing traffic, escalating privileges, and locating backups before they strike. This period between the initial breach and its discovery is known as dwell time.
Dwell time poses a significant problem for standard data retention policies. If a security solution only retains logs for 90 days, but an attacker has been lurking in your system for 120 days, the evidence of their entry point is gone.
You might catch them deploying ransomware today, but you will have no way of knowing how they got in four months ago – or what else they might have accessed in the meantime.
The business case for 365-day retention
For medical practices, moving to a 365-day retention model offers three distinct strategic advantages that go beyond basic IT compliance.
- Improved forensic analysis
When an incident occurs, the immediate priority is stopping it. But once the dust settles, the questions begin: Which patient files were accessed? Did they access the cloud server or just a reception terminal? Was this a phishing email or a software vulnerability?
To answer these questions, forensic analysts need history. 365-day retention allows security teams to wind back the clock a full year. They can trace the breadcrumbs of an attack back to its absolute origin. This capability is vital for accurately reporting the scope of a breach to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and affected patients. - Spotting historical patterns
Cyber threats are rarely isolated events. Often, a failed login attempt six months ago is related to a successful breach today. With extended retention, MXDR systems can analyse patterns over a longer timeline.
By keeping data for a full year, the AI-driven analytics within an MXDR solution can correlate seemingly innocent events from months ago with current activity, identifying threats that would otherwise look unrelated in a 30-day window. - Cyber insurance and compliance
The requirements for cyber insurance are becoming increasingly stringent. Insurers want to know that if a claim is made, the practice has the capability to investigate it thoroughly.
Having a 365-day retention policy demonstrates a higher level of cyber maturity. It shows that your practice is not just doing the bare minimum, but is actively prepared for deep analysis.
Taking the next step
Cybersecurity has to be an ongoing strategy. As malicious actors become more persistent, the window of data we use to detect them must widen.
While 14 to 30 days of data retention was once the industry standard, the sophistication of modern attacks on the healthcare sector demands a more robust approach.
By configuring your MXDR solution to retain data for 365 days, you give your practice the ability to see the full picture, making sure no threat goes unnoticed simply because the logs were deleted too soon.
If you are uncertain about your current data retention capabilities or want to discuss how MXDR can fit into your practice’s security strategy, contact the team at Ozdoc Solutions today.
Let’s ensure your technology is caring for you, so you can continue caring for your patients.
