Other ways to improve security in the cloud is to follow general security best practices such as the five pillars of zero trust. Ensure the organization has strong identity management, data governance and application management best practices in place. Regular security hygiene and patching should be a big focus in the cloud.
Network segmentation, another best practice, actually becomes easier in the cloud. When it comes to on-premises network segmentation, most healthcare organizations probably aren’t doing it. And if they are, they aren’t doing it well. However, due to the nature of cloud environments and Infrastructure as Code, network segmentation is easier in the cloud than it is on-premises.
If an organization wanted to implement microsegmentation on-premises, it would have to completely redesign its entire network. In the cloud, the organization has software to build out the infrastructure from scratch, meaning it can build those concepts in from the beginning.
EXPLORE: Empower innovation through stronger cloud security.
How Can Organizations Manage Cloud Environments Effectively?
According to the research report, 50% of all respondents across industries say they can manage their cloud environment very effectively. For the healthcare industry, only 43% of IT leaders say they can manage their cloud environment very effectively.
One reason that healthcare might be behind other industries is a lack of staffing. Many healthcare organizations — especially smaller, rural or nonprofit hospitals and health systems — can’t pay as much as organizations in other industries. While remote work has created a larger talent pool, that can hurt smaller organizations that can’t offer competitive salaries. As a result, many healthcare cloud positions can’t be filled easily, and the people who do have these skill sets tend to leave healthcare to work with large cloud vendors or in more competitive industries.
In addition, the number of full-time employees in IT is always under scrutiny from healthcare leadership. It represents a large percentage of an organization’s budget, but it’s not a revenue center. It is straight cost, which results in the IT team having to justify those expenses to the CFO. As costs rise across the board in healthcare, leadership begins to assess staffing levels. These challenges can have an impact on an organization’s ability to effectively manage the cloud.
However, to mitigate this issue, organizations can turn to a partner for managed services. A partner can help health systems manage the cloud more effectively at scale than the organization could do on its own.
It’s also crucial for organizations to focus on automation and Infrastructure as Code, as well as tying that back into the IT service management system. Doing so can make a difference in the IT team’s ability to move its staff up the stack. With cloud colocation, an organization can move away from lower-level staff work and instead offload those tasks onto somebody else via the cloud. This allows the organization’s staff to move up the stack toward the application level where they can be tied definitively to the overall healthcare business strategy.
LEARN MORE: How can healthcare use the cloud to its fullest potential?
How Can Healthcare Organizations Evolve Their Cloud Strategies?
Healthcare organizations are more likely than organizations in other industries to have moved workloads back on-premises after migrating them to the cloud. This finding from the report further emphasizes that healthcare is still early in the cloud maturity curve. Healthcare organizations are likely focused solely on cost, and the numbers also tell me that there was probably something wrong with their overarching journey into the cloud.
A successful cloud journey and program start with strategy. The organization should know why and how it is migrating to the cloud and managing those cloud workflows. There should also be an appropriate level of understanding about the cloud among internal stakeholders — from executives all the way to the technical team. The strategy should include a roadmap and governance.
When I heard this statement about healthcare moving workloads back on-premises, it made me think the organizations probably started their cloud journeys solely focused on the technical aspects of cloud migration, rather than the business aspects. It’s likely that they tried to start moving workloads to the cloud indiscriminately, leading to cloud bloat. They likely didn’t take the time to truly understand the architecture of their applications and rationalize them to make them as efficient as possible in the cloud.
