3 Key Considerations in Cloud Security for Healthcare Organizations

With medical system consolidation and increasing numbers of medical records created, the need for digital access and storage is gaining steam. Digitizing records allows clinicians to improve accuracy and decrease redundant testing and studies, as well as reduce treatment delays. Greater availability of digitized records has other perks too. With vast amounts of accessible medical data, researchers can move public health studies forward, also potentially improving care and treatment of individual patients. As a result, cloud storage is taking off, though healthcare organizations are adopting it more slowly than other industries. According to a 2019 Nutanix report, 71% of healthcare organizations using cloud were considered the least mature relative beginners in that they were using fewer cloud services. Compare that figure to finance or retail, where 13% and 15% respectively were beginners. However, that is changing.By 2022, an estimated 30% of hospital data centers will be cloud-based, according to a Gartner study. Even if data centers are not entirely moved to the cloud, a healthcare system may be using the cloud for some workload and computing, given the growth in big data. Cisco estimates that 94% of workload and compute instances will be processed by cloud data centers by 2021, with an anticipated growth from 2019 to 2021, of almost double the storage in cloud.