The healthcare sector has already been busy digitally reforming itself for years before the pandemic. However, the pandemic did push years of demand for remote work and telemedicine right into 2020. This led to a swift and significant transition toward cloud computing, but it also left a sizable number of legacy systems in place, which presented a significant issue for cybersecurity teams tasked with protecting these systems.
Many of the current cybersecurity issues facing the sector are brought on by a lack of qualified personnel, the weighty burden of aging infrastructure and technological debt, the rise in endpoints, and the complexity of the technical environments used in modern healthcare.
While using the cloud to manage and secure healthcare systems can be more straightforward, it can also be unclear where the healthcare organization’s obligation for cloud security begins and ends and where the cloud service provider assumes that role. Healthcare firms need to implement proper cloud security to keep up with the current security landscape.
Taking Care of Cloud Complexities
Despite these obstacles, the sector still has to expand and enhance its digital capabilities, especially in relation to the cloud. Although practitioners were not as able to work from home as many other industries, the flexibility of the cloud was a significant advantage last year and will become even more significant in the years to come. So how can healthcare cloud security be improved and why are steps to strengthen it necessary?
The complexity that the cloud adds is one of the biggest obstacles to security, especially in hybrid systems that combine new cloud assets with on-premise infrastructure. This can result in unnecessarily complex setups with gaps that are ready to be exploited by threat actors, which is especially challenging for well-established organizations with a lot of older technology.
A False Sense of Safety is Detrimental to Security
A common error is having a false sense of security about having a secure perimeter. Many businesses still rely on perimeter defenses like firewalls, which are outward-focused security methods. This strategy, however, is no longer sufficient on its own because it neglects to take into account dangers that are already present inside the network.
Phishing and other techniques are increasingly being used by criminals to steal user credentials and leverage their trusted identity to get beyond the outer defenses. Similar to other industries, the healthcare industry also has to deal with insider threats from dishonest or unhappy personnel abusing their access rights. Healthcare firms can lessen the catastrophic risk of security breaches within their platforms by implementing adequate cloud protection and reduce the amount of time and materials their team spends manually monitoring, assessing, reviewing, and fixing vulnerabilities.
Be Particularly Cautious of External Risks
The healthcare industry’s supply network makes it particularly susceptible to outside challenges. With varied levels of network access, providers frequently have extensive webs of external partners, suppliers, and contractors. The cloud has made it simpler than ever to start and develop these partnerships, but it has also exposed you to more risk.
An American healthcare provider named San Diego Family Care, for instance, experienced a significant data breach earlier this year involving the private information of 125,000 patients as a result of hackers taking advantage of the company’s cloud provider.
Safety and Security
How safe is it to store all of your apps and patient data on a third-party server, which is one of the most frequently raised questions when discussing the cloud? Particularly when businesses must adhere to legal requirements. However, properly implemented cloud servers can improve healthcare providers’ security. In the case of on-premises solutions, medical institutions run the risk of losing all their data and apps if the hardware malfunctions. Healthcare facilities cannot risk such a possible breach.
As automated backup and disaster recovery solutions are part of cloud computing, customers can access information remotely, and in the event of a breach, healthcare providers won’t lose any data and can cut down on staff downtime. To safeguard their clients from illegal access and breaches, the majority of cloud service providers now include safety, risk management, and monitoring services. It all comes down to evaluating the cloud service and the features it offers.
Read More: Know Your Patient – Making Adoption of Telehealth Reality
