SkyHigh Highlights Healthcare Cloud Security Concerns
SkyHigh Networks recently put out a study that gathered data from nearly all facets of healthcare IT. The chart gives details on the threats that plague the healthcare IT community. If you strictly look at the numbers, SkyHigh reports that there are on average 944 cloud services being used within healthcare IT organizations. SkyHigh also went on to find that the average number of collaboration services in use is 118.
Other findings show that 13.5% of the cloud services being used pose a high risk to health care IT organizations. 77% of cloud services fall within the medium risk category bringing the risk threat level for health care IT organizations to be within the 90% range. Some of the more astounding findings is that 53% of end users have more than 3 devices. SkyHigh reports that data was lifted from an average of 63 healthcare organizations within the last quarter. 73% of malware attacks were attacks that happened during off business hours.
This report comes on the heels of Community Health System’s 4.5 million patient data leak. Each of these points found in SkyHigh’s report highlight the need for cloud security within health care organizations. SkyHigh goes on to talk about how the gap is widening between attackers and defenders. Organizations must protect against a large spectrum of attacks while a hacker only needs to find the newest exploit. SkyHigh’s report also mentioned that while health care IT security is a big deal, there does seem to be a shortage of qualified individual willing to take the lead. Another threat is that large organizations typically found in Eastern European countries simply hack Western institutions for profit and fun. Since this has become a persistent threat, health care IT organizations are finding themselves overwhelmed by the new threats that seemingly come up daily.
