Should You Get Your Head Out Of The Cloud? (Follow-up)

Don Miller

In a recent post, bTrade’s MFT Nation explored two matters to consider when deciding between deploying your IT infrastructure on-premise (“on-prem”) or moving some or all of it to “the cloud.”  We said in that post that while cybersecurity considerations are “always vital,” some industry sectors generally do not trust cloud providers to safeguard their data.  Well, based on a recent report on CIO cloud perspectives, perhaps we should add the healthcare industry to the list of doubters.

The article, entitled “Healthcare Cloud Take-off: Waiting for the Fog to Clear,” summarizes the results of a survey taken at HIMSS18 Las Vegas conference of 175 healthcare IT professionals.  Although nearly 60% of respondents said their organizations have placed a priority on moving some IT to the cloud, only about 30% have devised a cloud migration strategy.  Why?  According to the survey, HIPAA compliance, security, and privacy worries are the main reasons why healthcare IT professionals are reluctant to use the cloud.  And around 50 percent of respondents cited security concerns as their primary worry associated with cloud migration.

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The CEO of the company that produced the report offered this thought about the results:  “Although cloud hosting for healthcare has become mainstream, the understanding of and confidence in the cloud to meet the exacting standards of the highly regulated industry is still a major concern for healthcare systems.”  The report concluded with this observation:  “Healthcare organizations are not 100 percent convinced that cloud storage is safe for the protected health information (PHI) of their patients and therefore remain grounded for take-off.”