Top Five Challenges of Healthcare Cloud Deployments and How to Solve Them

The following is a guest blog post by Chad Kissinger, Founder of OnRamp.

According to the HIMSS 2016 Survey, 84 percent of providers are currently using a cloud service, showing security and compliance issues are not preventing organizations from deploying cloud environments. Despite growing adoption rates, breaches and security incidents continue to rise. Cloud deployments and ongoing environment management errors are to blame. 

Cloud services offer clear benefits—performance, cost savings, and scalability to name a few—so it’s no wonder healthcare organizations, like yours, are eager to take advantage of all that the cloud has to offer. Unfortunately, vulnerabilities are often introduced to your network when you adopt new technology. Let’s discuss how to identify and overcome common challenges in secure, compliant cloud deployments so you can opportunistically adopt cloud-based solutions while remaining on the right side of the law.

1. Ambiguous Delegation of Responsibilities
When technology is new to an organization, the responsibility of finding and managing that solution is often unclear. You must determine who owns your data. Is it your IT Department? Or perhaps your Security Department? It’s difficult to coordinate different people across departments, and even more difficult to communicate effectively between your organization and your provider. The delegation of responsibilities between you and your business associate will vary based on your service model—i.e. software as a service, infrastructure as a service, etc.

To prevent these issues, audit operational and business processes to determine the people, roles, and responsibilities for your team internally. Repeat the process for those services you will outsource to your cloud provider. Your business associate agreement should note the details of each party’s responsibilities, avoiding ambiguity and gaps in security or compliance. Look for provider credentials verified by third-party entities that demonstrate security levels at the data center level, such as HITRUST CSF and SSAE 16 SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC3.

2.    Lack of Policies, Standards, and Security Practices
If your organization doesn’t have a solid foundation of policies, standards, and security practices, you will likely experience one or more of the security-related issues outlined below. It’s necessary to not only create policies, but also ensure your organization is able to enforce them consistently.

  • Shadow IT. According to a recent HyTrust Cloud Survey of 51 organizations, 40% of cloud services are commissioned without IT input.
  • Cloud Portability and Mobility. Mitigating risks among many endpoints, from wearables to smart beds, becomes more difficult as you add more end points.
  • Privileged User Access. Divide your user access by work role and limit access to mitigate malicious insider attacks.
  • Ongoing Staff Education and Training. Your team needs to be properly trained in best practices and understand the role that they play in cybersecurity.

Proper security and compliance also involves the processes that safeguard your data and the documentation that proves your efforts. Such processes include auditing operational and business processes, managing people, roles and identities, ensuring proper protection of data and information, assessing the security provisions for cloud applications, and data decommissioning.

Communicate your security and compliance policies to your cloud provider to ensure their end of the operations falls in line with your overall plan.

3. Protecting Data and Meeting HIPAA Controls
The HIPAA Privacy Rule, the HIPAA Security Rule, and HITECH all aim to secure your electronic protected health information (ePHI) and establish the national standards. Your concern is maintaining the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of sensitive data. In practice, this includes:

  • Technology
  • Safeguards (Physical & Administrative)
  • Process
  • People
  • Business Associates & Support
  • Auditable Compliance

Network solution experts recognize HIPAA compliant data must be secure, but also needs to be readily available to users and retain integrity across platforms. Using experienced cloud solution providers will bridge the gap between HIPAA requirements, patient administration, and the benefit of technology to treat healthcare clients and facilitate care.

Seek the right technology and implement controls that are both “required and addressed” within HIPAA’s regulations. When it comes to security, you can never be too prepared. Here are some of the measures you’ll want to implement:

  • Data encryption in transit and at rest
  • Firewalls
  • Multi-factor Authentication
  • Cloud Encryption Key Management
  • Audit logs showing access to ePHI
  • Vulnerability scanning, intrusion detection/prevention
  • Hardware and OS patching
  • Security Audits
  • Contingency Planning—regular data backup and disaster recovery plan

The number one mistake organizations make in protected data in a cloud deployment is insufficient encryption, followed by key management. Encryption must be FIPS 140-2 compliant.

4.    Ensuring Data Availability, Reliability, and Integrity
The key to service reliability and uptime is in your data backups and disaster recovery (DR) efforts. Data backup is not the same as disaster recovery—this is a common misconception. Data backup is part of business continuity planning, but requires much more. There’s a gap between how organizations perceive their track records and the reality of their DR capabilities. The “CloudEndure Survey of 2016” notes that 90% of respondents claim they meet their availability, but only 38% meet their goals consistently, and 22% of the organizations surveyed don’t measure service availability at all. Keep in mind that downtime can result from your cloud provider—and this is out of your control. For instance, the AWS outage earlier this year caused a ruckus after many cloud-based programs stopped functioning.

5.    Ability to Convey Auditable Compliance (Transparency)
Investors, customers, and regulators cannot easily discern that your cloud environment is compliant because it’s not as visible as other solutions, like on-premise hosting. You will have to work closely with your cloud provider to identify how to document your technology, policies, and procedures in order to document your efforts and prove auditable compliance.

Putting It All Together
The cloud provides significant advantages, but transitioning into the cloud requires a thorough roadmap with checkpoints for security and compliance along the way. Remember that technology is just the first step in a secure cloud deployment—proper security and compliance also involves the processes that protect your sensitive data and the documentation that proves your compliance efforts. You’ll want to identify resources from IT, security and operations to participate in your cloud deployment process, and choose a cloud provider that’s certified and knowledgeable in the nuances of healthcare cloud deployments.

For more information download the white paper “HOW TO DEPLOY A SECURE, COMPLIANT CLOUD FOR HEALTHCARE.”

About OnRamp

OnRamp is a HITRUST-certified data center services company that specializes in high security and compliant hybrid hosting and is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene. Our solutions help organizations meet compliance standards including, HIPAA, PCI, SOX, FISMA and FERPA. As an SSAE 16 SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3, PCI-DSS certified, and HIPAA compliant company, OnRamp operates multiple enterprise-class data centers to deploy cloud computing, colocation, and managed services. Visit www.onr.com or call 888.667.2660 to learn more.

   

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