The drive to the cloud is picking up speed, but is cloud security ready to meet demand?
Brian Ahern, chairman and CEO of Threat Stack in Boston: The sensitive nature of healthcare data and personal health information makes it a high-value target for cyber criminals. In addition, healthcare's extensive partner network made up of providers, administrators, insurance companies, billing parties, etc. — all with access and transfer rights — means healthcare's protection against cyber threats is only as strong as the weakest link in its business chain.
Despite security concerns, healthcare organizations are increasingly trusting public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, with their sensitive data, while expanding at unregulated speed.
Recent announcements of millions of healthcare records obtained through insecure servers underscores the criticality of detecting anomalous user-behavior inside servers and their workloads. Without the proper user-access controls and alerting systems in place to identify anomalous behavior, the system as a whole is at risk for compromise. It's your responsibility to monitor your cloud workloads and listen to what it's telling you so you don't find yourself and your business on the "reactive" side of a breach.