October 1, 2019 in Cloud Security

Are Healthcare Organizations Failing To Protect Sensitive Data In The Cloud?

Expert says by 2022, there will be more than 30% of hospital data centers will be hosted in the cloud. Yet, a survey conducted in 2019 highlights insufficient security practices regarding the security issues of data stored in these cloud infrastructures. The healthcare sector is one of the prime targets of computer attacks, with a few cases in the news

According to the survey, 26% of industry players say they have experienced at least one cloud-related security incident over the past year. Despite this, 32% of healthcare organizations store sensitive data in the cloud without adequate resources to protect it. These data include medical information and personalinformation to identify customers and employees.

At the same time, the number of healthcare organizations willing to give priority to the cloud has risen by 31% in one year, now reaching more than half of respondents, and 34% of them even consider turning entirely to the cloud. Health still suffers from a lack of security resources.

More worrisome, the budgets allocated to cloud security are far from having increased in the same proportions: in 85% of companies, they simply have not moved in 2019. In healthcare organizations, one-third of IT teams also report receiving no financial support from their management. Among the actions planned by these teams, data encryption is at the top, cited by 70% of respondents. In the second position comes the monitoring of the use of the data (50% of answers).

Some actors plan repatriation of data on-site Lastly, 18% of the respondents think about going back on the Cloud, by retransferring certain data on-site. Their main motivations are security issues (56%), reliability and performance issues (22%) and high costs (22%) of the cloud. If this reflection materializes, the companies concerned will start by migrating the information related to healthcare (33%), customers (33%) and employees (11%).