In spite of enough awareness, still, most of the healthcare organizations hesitate when moving to a cloud ecosystem. They have a threat of many healthcare cloud security concerns coming their way.
But it has been observed that, if deployed properly, the cloud can be a powerful tool for a medical enterprise. AWS is one of the most popular healthcare cloud options from the perspective of a public cloud.
AWS offers quite a few options for specific workloads such as for biotech and pharma, genomics, and even options for healthcare insurers and providers. But apart from several benefits, there are some concerns related to cloud security. Let’s explore the top five of these concerns in the article.
1. Complete Security Of Healthcare Sensitive Data
Healthcare data security is one of the biggest concerns related to cloud hosting services. According to a report produced by Ponemon Institute the average healthcare data breach costs to be $380 per record.
In order to understand this concern properly, first, it is essential to focus on what happens when you put the sensitive data in the cloud? It is proved that most likely if you design your cloud, its connectivity, and infrastructure properly, the data remains safe.
Many cloud leaders and data centres are working in collaboration with protected healthcare information (PHI) in order to deliver compliant services for healthcare offerings. But still, if security is your first concern, it is a good idea to consult with a cloud or data centre partner who is an expert in migrating different healthcare apps, workloads, and data into their infrastructure.
There are some great examples where hybrid cloud architectures have been specifically designed while still fulfilling all AWS HIPAA compliance requirements. These architectures meant to keep the PHI completely safe and secure.
2. Total Cost Of Ownership Can Be High
Cloud can be expensive in case if it is not designed properly. This is experienced by most of the organizations during early implementations around cloud computing. Though, cloud design and architecture has come a long way. You should pay attention to small details and figure out which users, workloads, and data points live in the ecosystem of a cloud.
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The best possible pricing model can be discovered by measuring data requirements, locality, and usage in accordance with your specific needs. It is advisable to work with professional cloud partners or data centre. Also, you can think wisely and plan your own deployment, identify the situations where you might need more resources in the future, and make sure to integrate agility in the complete process.
3. Dependability Of The Network
This can be one of the biggest barriers to the cloud entry for a healthcare organization. In some of the situations, apps are supporting standard backend healthcare processes. While in others, data sets and key apps are supposed to save lives. Therefore, the kind of services you can deliver is highly dependent on the reliability of your network.
In addition, there is no scope for an unreliable network or a jitter is the field like telemedicine where more connected healthcare systems and advancements are available. Here, the first focus should be on the design.
When creating your own design, you have to take data proximity, the importance of the application or data set, and where access is happening from into consideration. In today’s fast-paced medical industry, ‘slow is the new down’ where it is mandatory for you to ensure that workloads and key apps are available.
4. Reliability Of The Cloud Data Storage
It is true that there are several cloud storage alternatives available in the marketplace. You can utilize primary storage, cold storage, and even archival storage for different data points in accordance with your specific requirements. From there, you can choose the type of storage you need and where you want the data to reside.
In order to work properly with sensitive data, it is vital for you to understand locality and data sovereignty requirements. With the help of a professional cloud and data centre providers that are ready for healthcare workloads, you can easily keep your data at the place you need and access it as and when required.
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The only point to be noted here is that don’t consider the price factor alone. In case you need an extra boost or performance, ensure you account for that. Otherwise, you have to pay much more for poor performance or storage latency than what you required to pay for investing in good technology solutions.
5. Levels Of Service
Creating and maintaining good SLAs in healthcare associated with cloud and data centre space can prove to be a bit difficult. A lot of components require good service level structure. Therefore, it becomes essential for you to have a deep understanding of your critical systems, in case you are planning to move to the cloud or already have a healthcare cloud instance.
Explore the answers to a few questions such as can you survive without a certain app? How long can you survive without a certain data service? Or, is there a backup to support a situation in which a part of the environment goes down?
In addition, it is also important for you to keep evaluating your SLA agreements at regular intervals of time. It will help in the evolution of the SLA in accordance with the changes in your company, apps, and data.
These are the five major healthcare cloud security concerns which can be easily avoided by working with a good partner or data center. You just have to understand your own strategies and develop a cloud model that resonates with your specific needs.
| About the Guest Author:
Anubhuti Shrivastava is a content crafter at Arkenea, a custom software development company helping entrepreneurs and businesses build successful web and mobile apps. She is passionate about writing articles on topics related to design and the software development industry.
