Why We Recommend ABELDent Cloud
While ABELDent Local Plus remains an excellent solution for practices that prefer to maintain and protect their own servers, ABELDent Cloud offers stronger security, more effective technology management, built-in patient services, and easier access to future innovations.
1. Better Protection Against Cyber Threats
Dental practices are increasingly targeted by ransomware, phishing attacks, and data theft, making cybersecurity and business continuity critical concerns. ABELDent Cloud is built on Microsoft Azure, one of the world’s most trusted and secure cloud platforms, used by governments, healthcare organizations, and enterprises worldwide.
Beyond simply hosting our solution in Azure, ABELDent actively leverages Microsoft’s advanced security ecosystem, including continuous threat monitoring, enterprise-grade identity and access controls, encrypted data storage, automated cloud-based data backups, disaster recovery capabilities, and highly resilient infrastructure designed for maximum availability. Unlike traditional on-premise environments, ABELDent Cloud does not provide customers, third-party vendors, or end users with direct access to the underlying database, helping reduce the risk of unauthorized access, data manipulation, malware infections, and other security vulnerabilities.
Our team continuously evaluates and adopts new Azure security, compliance, and operational capabilities as they become available, ensuring our customers benefit from the same technologies used to protect some of the world’s largest organizations. The result is a cloud platform that not only helps protect sensitive patient information but also reduces the risk of downtime, data loss, regulatory exposure, and costly cybersecurity incidents, allowing dental practices to focus on patient care rather than IT concerns.
2. Reduces the Risk of Human Error
Many security incidents occur because someone is tricked into clicking a malicious link, opening an infected attachment, or sharing login information. Even practices with excellent staff and IT providers face this risk. ABELDent Cloud adds multiple layers of security to help protect the practice, even when mistakes occur, reducing the likelihood that a simple error becomes a major business disruption.
3. Built-In Patient Services
Because patients use their mobile devices to communicate with your practice through the cloud, ABELDent Cloud includes PCS (Patient & Cloud Services), providing integrated patient communication capabilities within the ABELDent platform.
4. More Effective Technology Management
With ABELDent Cloud, there is no ABELDent server to maintain, monitor, back up, or replace. In most practices, replacing a server is an unexpected expense that occurs every few years. With ABELDent Cloud, server hardware lifecycle planning, replacement, backup infrastructure, Microsoft SQL licenses and related maintenance costs are significantly reduced or eliminated.
Your IT provider continues to manage your computers, network, cybersecurity, Microsoft 365 environment, and internet connectivity. Through our ongoing cooperation, they can also play an active role in staff security awareness training. Meanwhile, ABELDent manages and maintains the application infrastructure directly, including reporting and other functionalities, reducing the burden on your practice and IT team.
5. Ready for the Future
Again, because patients use their mobile devices to communicate with your practice through the cloud, many of ABELDent’s future enhancements, including AI-powered capabilities, patient engagement services, analytics, and cloud innovations, are designed for the cloud platform.
Practices on ABELDent Cloud will be best positioned to benefit from these advancements. ABELDent Cloud will allow you to communicate from any internet-connected computer, enabling remote functionality.
6. Bottom Line
While a local server may offer certain performance advantages in specific circumstances, the decision involves far more than speed alone. It is about protecting your practice, your patient data, and your future.
With enterprise-grade Microsoft Azure security, reduced exposure to cyber threats, built-in PCS services, automatic backups, and direct access to future innovations, many practices conclude that ABELDent Cloud provides significantly greater long-term value than a traditional server-based environment.
If you are an ABELDent Cloud user experiencing performance issues due to internet bandwidth or any other reason, we would appreciate the opportunity to work with you to identify, investigate, and address any performance concerns. Our goal is to ensure that you receive the full value of the security, resilience, patient services, and future innovation that ABELDent Cloud is designed to deliver.
Notice 1: Patient Privacy Risks from Unauthorized Third-Party Database Access on Local Servers
One of the key security advantages of ABELDent Cloud is that it does not permit direct access to the underlying ABELDent database. This significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access, accidental data corruption, and cybersecurity threats targeting patient information.
Some third-party software products used with our locally hosted systems directly access the ABELDent database rather than using a secure ABELDent API. As AI-assisted cyberattacks, ransomware, and data theft continue to increase, we are concerned about the risks associated with these types of database connections. Because these vendors operate independently of ABELDent, we do not oversee their security practices, software design, data handling procedures, or ongoing compliance controls.
Direct database access typically requires credentials, permissions, and communication pathways to the database, which can expand the attack surface available to cybercriminals. If compromised, these connections may increase the risk of unauthorized access to patient information, privacy breaches, data integrity issues, operational disruptions, and reputational damage. Since each practice remains responsible for safeguarding patient data, it is important that you carefully evaluate these risks before authorizing direct access to the database.
The most secure approach is to avoid granting third parties direct access to your database whenever possible. Where integration is required, ABELDent can provide secure, customized API-based access to qualified vendors, subject to your approval. While no integration is entirely risk-free, an API-based approach can significantly reduce the security and privacy risks associated with direct database connections.
Notice 2: Customers Using Unsupported SQL licenses
Microsoft ended support for SQL Server 2016 on July 14. Customers running SQL 2016 or earlier must update their SQL licenses unless they are upgrading to ABELDent Cloud.
Customers who purchase Guided Update Services (GUS) and are ready to upgrade to ABELDent Cloud promptly will receive any required SQL license updates at no charge while awaiting their scheduled migration. If scheduling delays occur on our side, ABELDent will assume the Microsoft compliance risk and will not hold you responsible.
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