Meeting practical business and security challenges of healthcare apps in the cloud

There has been, understandably, a great deal of interest for moving all kinds of applications “into the cloud” (like software as a service or SaaS) because it can ease deployment and reduce costs. However, due to the nature of the healthcare data, security is a special concern. If you’re interested in moving to the cloud, check out an article I wrote last week for IBM entitled “Cloud computing by government agencies“; while it’s focused on public sector, it’s just as applicable to healthcare sector because the problems are identical.

Here’s what I covered in the article:

• Business and technical challenges of moving to the cloud
• Overall security advantages gained by moving to the cloud
• Overall security challenges presented by moving to the cloud
• Personnel, identity management, and access control risks
• Data leakage risks
• Multi-tenant hosting risks
• Handling secret information
• Auditing and logging
• Denial of service and defacing risks
• Spoofing, eavesdropping, and packet sniffing risks