It’s no secret, cloud applications power modern enterprises expected to surpass $1 trillion in global spending by 2027. The adoption of cloud infrastructure for application modernization will propel organizations into the future and the healthcare industry is no different. However, the sensitive nature of health data, combined with the healthcare sector’s increasing reliance on cloud infrastructure, makes it a prime target for cyber threats. From March 2023 to March 2024, healthcare entities reported 633 data breaches to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR), with each incident affecting more than 500 patients.
Adversaries are targeting the mission-critical applications and data that healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs) maintain in their cloud environments:
- Protected Healthcare Information (PHI)—including medical records, test results and treatment plans—holds substantial market value on the dark web.
- Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which encompasses sensitive details such as names, addresses, Social Security numbers and medical histories, is highly attractive to identity thieves who seek to exploit personal information.
- Payment Card Data (covered by PCI DSS), such as credit card and cardholder information stored in patient records, pharmacy systems and even retail gift shop payment systems, can be stolen, increasing the risk of fraudulent transactions.
- Intellectual Property (IP), such as research findings, innovative medical technologies and proprietary methodologies produced within HDOs is coveted by malicious actors who aim to gain an unfair advantage or financial windfall.
We’ve seen this play out recently with the Change Healthcare ransomware attack that affected billing and care authorization portals and also led to prescription backlogs and missed revenue for providers, posing potential threats to worker paychecks and even patient care. The rise of AI will only exacerbate the scale of attacks we’ll see in the years to come.
Traditional cloud security solutions provide siloed views of an organization’s risk as they lack specific capabilities for understanding how an application was created, deployed and shipped into production. This context is key for security teams to quickly identify and remediate risks before they’re too late. Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) have seen a rise in popularity as they are the only way to effectively see an organization’s entire cloud ecosystem and the risks that lie within.
Healthcare organizations investing heavily into cloud infrastructure ought to also invest similarly into a comprehensive cloud security platform that can keep their mission-critical applications secure. Here are just a few benefits healthcare organizations can expect.
Scaling Understaffed Teams by Consolidating Tools
With budgets tightening, cybersecurity talent is difficult to staff, and too many siloed tools to effectively monitor, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for healthcare entities to ensure adequate protection of their cloud environment. This can result in a slow response to emerging threats, which is unacceptable when dealing with critical healthcare infrastructure.
To overcome this problem, security teams need a single console that:
- Consolidates all code, application and cloud risk signals into a single data lake
- Combines security signals to find combinations of issues that form attack paths—including breached pathways—to aid alert prioritization
- Performs root cause analysis, tracing production risks back to the development environment and code where remediation efforts are easiest
Protecting Sensitive Data
Healthcare organizations are a treasure trove of sensitive data such as patient health records. The loss or exposure of this data could lead to financial ramifications, legal issues and a damaged reputation. Protecting PHI data is about maintaining trust. Patients expect their information to be kept confidential, and ensuring data security helps meet these expectations.
To help protect sensitive data, organizations should ensure the cloud security platform they choose is equipped with data security posture management (DSPM) tools that include discovery, classification, protection and governance of sensitive data hosted in the cloud. This means healthcare institutions can seamlessly protect sensitive information such as PHI, PII, IP and credit card data with the same platform that protects the rest of their cloud environment.
Saving Time on Compliance Efforts
Staying compliant has never been an easy task and moving to the cloud increases the complexity of that endeavor. Healthcare organizations handling sensitive data must comply with multiple complex frameworks such as HIPAA or HITRUST, which means cycles are continuously being spent on compliance drills such as reporting and auditing. A comprehensive security platform can reduce compliance efforts by as much as 90%. That’s because security teams can easily understand which of their regulated cloud assets would pass or fail specific HIPAA compliance checks, remediate violations and generate audit-ready reports.
The sensitive nature of the healthcare industry with the addition of compliance regulations makes comprehensive cloud security platforms the ideal solution for healthcare organizations.
Rebecca Pifer 
Emily Olsen