As more healthcare data moves to the cloud, and nearly 96 million records were stolen among breaches to Community Health Systems, Anthem and Premera, Dan Manuro, in Forbes, poses the question; is the cloud ready for healthcare?
Here are seven key points:
1. Mr. Manuro said to expect to see more risks posed to electronic health data, as such sensitive data poses a higher value to hackers than a stolen credit.
2. Companies who have been the victim of a cyber attack usually do not disclose details of the attack, so the ramifications for the company are usually to manage public perception and internally work on security.
3. In the cloud, data is managed by a third party hosting provider, and is growing in prominence and hardly immune from attacks, according to the article.
4. The cloud should be of concern to because medical data is "lifelong and can have serious clinical consequences;" motivated attackers hold a large advantage over defenders and because cyber theft is more focused on sophisticated attacks from the inside as opposed to from the outside, according to Mr. Manuro.
5. In Q2 of 2015, there were on average 928 cloud services in use at healthcare organizations.
6. Of the 928 cloud services, about 93 percent of them pose a medium or high security risk to the healthcare organization, according to the report.
7. There are security advantages to cloud services compared to on-premise solutions, but they are not invincible to attacks, whether those be internal or external, according to Mr. Manuro.