The Dangers of Cloud Computing, Is It Right for Your Business?
Cloud Security in the Medical Field
Cloud technology is a rapidly expanding technology and with any new technology there come new risks. Many companies and facilities have tried to make the switch to cloud computing without properly trained technicians staffed to run it and created more problems than solutions to their networks. Cloud technology is the new rage and many CISO’s have been quick to gain funding to implement such technologies to keep up with the industry.
By moving clinical IT support systems to the cloud the biggest concern will be in giving up control of such systems to use a cloud provider’s resources. Typically a cloud provider can make changes to the infrastructure without telling us, we will need to address this issue and make sure we are properly notified of such changes as these could potentially affect our medical systems. Performance and reliability will also be taken out of our hands, we will be at the mercy of our cloud provider, and if resources are not properly managed we could experience major performance issues.
Security of our clinical IT center would have fallen upon our internal IT support staff team, but moving to the cloud changes that. Moving our center to the cloud means that we are no longer full in charge of our own security. We now have to trust that the management team hosting our cloud services is competent enough to secure our network and update it regularly as would be expected of our own security internally. We will also be completely unsure of who exactly has access to our data stored in the cloud and who can access it. If a break in occurs of the cloud vendors systems, either physically or through hacking our data could be at risk.
Vendor lock-in should also be a red flag as cloud vendors create their own proprietary software to run the networks. This means that vendors are even creating their own proprietary interfaces that may force us to stay with a vendor longer than we would like. If our systems are run by software and interfaces that are not transferable to another vendor we may be at the mercy of the vendor’s software and interfaces to successfully run our company. Standards for how applications communicate and control other applications that are inside of the cloud have not yet been established and developed yet. This same issue may create some issues when we need to do an audit of our IT resources, we will not have total true visibility into the cloud network.
Reliability of the cloud should be a concern as guarantees of 100% liability are not common. Vendors typically guarantee 99.9% uptime, this provides them some blanket of security in the contract if any unforeseen errors come up.
All this aside, cloud computing is an exciting new technology and may allow our medical center to save valuable money on hardware, bandwidth cost and other overhead costs that would be associated with housing our own network to run the new clinical IT center. Cloud computing may allow us to grow the company faster and handle tasks at a faster rate but we need to make sure the risks don’t outweigh the potential rewards.
In order to mitigate these risks we will need to make sure that we choose a reliable cloud computing vendor. We will need to make sure that we have an iron clad contract, and know exactly what will happen in the event of downtimes, security breaches, network slowdowns and other issues that may hinder our performance.
About the Author: Ryan Andes
Ryan Andes is qualified by fourteen years of information security experience, of which eight years were spent as a blackhat, and the following security related certifications EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker, CISSP, Security+, Network+ and iNet+ and also runs CertifiedHackers.net and Certifiedhackers.org
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