Enhancing Healthcare with Cloud Tech Without Compromising Security

Cloud technology has rapidly reshaped the healthcare landscape, offering unprecedented opportunities for scalability, collaboration, and data-driven insights. These insights are unlocking new levels of efficiency and effectiveness in healthcare and promising to transform patient care and operational agility. This is why healthcare is becoming a leader in cloud adoption, with many organizations housing over half of their data or infrastructure in the cloud.

Yet, adopting cloud technology also introduces complex security challenges, particularly in safeguarding Protected Health Information (PHI). Unlike traditional IT environments, cloud-based systems are often exposed to various security threats, from data breaches to regulatory compliance risks demanding stringent data governance. Securing PHI in the cloud requires a proactive approach that balances accessibility with robust security controls to protect against cyber threats while ensuring compliance with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR.

This blog explores the benefits and risks of cloud technology in healthcare. It provides essential best practices to help healthcare organizations navigate these challenges while harnessing the cloud’s potential without compromising patient privacy and data security.

Benefits of Cloud Technology for Healthcare

Cloud technology in healthcare has taken off due to its remarkable scalability and flexibility, which enable organizations to adapt to rapidly changing demands without the financial burden of building out physical infrastructure. For healthcare providers, this flexibility means resources can be adjusted dynamically to handle seasonal influxes of patients, public health crises, or even routine fluctuations in service needs. This capability to scale up or down as required is critical for modern healthcare, where responsiveness can directly impact patient outcomes and operational efficiency.

Beyond flexibility, cloud technology also delivers significant cost savings by reducing the need for costly on-premises infrastructure and the associated maintenance. Cloud providers handle regular updates and system maintenance, which eases the burden on in-house IT teams and frees up resources that can be redirected to more patient-centric initiatives. The cloud also enables enhanced collaboration among healthcare professionals, a crucial factor for telemedicine and cross-functional care coordination. 

Security Challenges with Cloud Exposure

Managing healthcare in the cloud is challenging because it combines the need for storing and processing sensitive patient data with the risk of relying on a third party to host it. All of this requires a level of trust in the security and reliability of the third-party provider to deliver on their share of security. However, based on the shared security model of the cloud, even if the host does everything right, misconfigurations and mismanagement by the provider can still expose sensitive PHI or Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

Data Privacy and Compliance

In healthcare, managing the compliance complexities of cloud technology demands precise tracking of where PHI is stored and who has access to it. In multi-cloud environments, PHI can be dispersed across various locations and providers, limiting visibility and control over its exact location. This lack of clarity introduces risks, as unauthorized access or data spillage may occur, particularly if PHI is unknowingly stored in regions with lower data protection standards.

Moreover, cloud environments’ fluid nature necessitates monitoring data movement to prevent unintended exposure. As PHI moves across applications and storage systems, healthcare organizations need mechanisms to maintain an auditable record of who accessed data and when they accessed it. This tracking becomes increasingly complex as organizations utilize cloud services across geographic boundaries to enhance accessibility, subjecting data to a broader array of regulatory requirements.

Third-Party Access Vulnerabilities

By their very nature, cloud providers are third-party vendors that healthcare organizations partner with. However, this is only part of the equation, as most cloud services tie together services from other external providers, from diagnostic labs to billing, and require access to PHI to deliver their services effectively. Each additional access point introduces potential vulnerabilities, especially if a third party fails to maintain the same security standards, as seen in the recent American Express breach and Ticketmaster/Snowflake breach. 

Third parties may also include collaborators for providing patient care or medical research. Cloud services and collaboration tools help streamline communication and information sharing, which is necessary for providing optimal patient care. However, these environments can expose sensitive information to accidental leaks or unauthorized access without proper safeguards. Whether it’s healthcare or other industries that ingest and store large amounts of sensitive data and collaborate with outside vendors, the third-party risks remain the same.

Best Practices for Protecting PHI in the Cloud

To protect PHI in cloud environments, healthcare organizations should adopt a Zero Trust security model that treats all access as potentially risky, requiring continuous validation of every access request. Not only does the Zero Trust model reduce the risk of unauthorized access and data exposure, it is particularly critical in cloud environments where PHI flows across diverse systems and platforms. In healthcare, where a single breach can have far-reaching impacts on patient privacy and trust, Zero Trust is especially valuable, as it establishes stringent controls at every access point, ensuring PHI remains secure across all touchpoints, whether accessed by internal staff, third parties, or automated processes.

Real-time threat detection and response capabilities further enhance PHI security by allowing healthcare organizations to detect and neutralize threats as they emerge. Unlike traditional systems that respond only after an incident, real-time monitoring tools proactively scan data in motion, identifying and disarming threats immediately. This approach minimizes the chances of sensitive data reaching unauthorized endpoints and significantly shortens response times, which is crucial for reducing breach impacts in healthcare. 

Real-time data detection and response (DDR) technologies are especially effective here, as they continuously evaluate incoming data, using advanced sanitization techniques to neutralize threats before they interact with critical systems, preventing malware and other hidden threats from breaching the environment. DDR also helps improve secure data sharing and collaboration to facilitate efficient information exchange among healthcare teams. DDR solutions that integrate antivirus (AV) or Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR) also help protect PHI from file-borne threats while allowing clinicians and staff to collaborate seamlessly, ensuring that patient care remains timely and secure.

Votiro Helps Secure Healthcare Data In the Cloud

Votiro’s Zero Trust DDR platform empowers organizations to secure sensitive data in the cloud, combining proactive defense against file-based threats with robust privacy and compliance management. By leveraging Votiro’s multi-faceted security solution, organizations gain comprehensive visibility into data activity, identifying common entry points, high-risk file types, and frequently targeted users. This level of insight enhances security teams’ ability to understand, anticipate, and respond to evolving digital threats, ultimately supporting a more resilient data security strategy.

Votiro’s patented Positive Selection® CDR technology sanitizes malicious files as they move through channels such as file-sharing services, emails, and collaboration platforms. This approach actively neutralizes potential threats within files, ensuring that only safe content reaches critical systems without disrupting user workflows. In tandem, Votiro enables real-time detection and masking of sensitive information, applying predefined organizational rules to protect against inadvertent data leaks and breaches. This real-time sanitization and privacy management keeps sensitive data secure and compliant, regardless of where it flows within the cloud ecosystem.

Through a unified platform, Votiro provides security teams with the tools needed to maintain strong data defenses across complex cloud environments, such as those implemented by healthcare organizations. By integrating proactive threat elimination and compliance measures into everyday workflows, Votiro helps organizations uphold rigorous data privacy standards while meeting compliance mandates. This powerful combination of threat intelligence, data sanitization, and privacy controls allows organizations to fully control their cloud data security, enhancing their ability to protect against current and future threats.

Sign up for a one-on-one demo to learn more about our Data Detection and Response capabilities and how we can keep you compliant. You can also try Votiro free for 30 days and see for yourself how we proactively defend sensitive data in the cloud.