Over the past weekend, chaos erupted and Universal Health Services experienced what could be now potentially the largest cyberattack in United States history, affecting more than 400 hospitals by causing their computer systems to fail, prompting employees to fill out patient information manually with pen and paper. While Universal Health Services itself did not respond to allegations, those familiar with the company security and response issues mentioned that the outage "looks and smells like ransomware." 

Two other employees of Universal Health Services commented that the attack had begun over the weekend and caused delays and hardships in the work of employees. The cyberattack could have been much worse, as in the past patients have suffered and even died due to an indirect result from cyber attacks launched at hospitals around the world. Luckily, at this time it appears nobody has past away due to the malicious behavior that may be taking place across the Universal Health Services computer network. 

Medical data and information is critical to have at any given moment as it may make a difference in saving one's life, and thus it is also critical to have the highest security available for computer networks which have such delicate and necessary information to prevent attacks such as this one. Otherwise, the impact could be more severe and in some cases, even fatal.

Cyber Security Consulting companies are always interested in new value-added advice they can provide to their clients. One potentially lucrative area is recommending a synthetic data solution that would eliminate the risk of a data breach through your development, laboratory, and testing ecosystems where most breaches occur.  
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This is potentially a very lucrative market opportunity for these consulting companies. Software development globally is estimated to be around $500B annually, of which about 30% or $150B is for test data provisioning. This is all being done today through a process that modifies production data with the potential to convert to services revenue through a new disruptive synthetic data process. ROI’s are strong for the end customer eliminating repetitive labor tasks, compressing development times and removing a security risk area, which drives high margins for these new professional services.  

Learn more at www.exactdata.net 

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​As of today, most companies in the world still use big data with big costs to account for all of their testing and production value. Companies like Amazon and Oracle rely on large datasets which while are sufficient, aren't able to be used as much after a few years due to changing standards in the world. 

By utilizing artificially generated data, these companies would be able to mold their data so it can be adaptable with the next big trend. Thus, be applicable in years to come rather than have to continually spend a lot on R&D and production testing operations to yield very similar results to its synthetic data alternative.

Financial analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are just a few of the benefits you may reap from switching over to a synthetic data alternative, and with the technological advances being made in our society, getting ahead of the curve is the key to being the next big thing in the industry. 

When expanding out and scaling a company, expenses don't have to expand with you; minimizing costs on data and production testing is possible in several ways, but none better than making that switch to synthetic data.