Healthcare IT pros believe data is safer in the cloud

Healthcare IT professionals and executives believe overwhelmingly that when facing hardware malfunctions and environmental disasters, their organization’s data is safer in the cloud than on premises, according to Evolve IP.

The survey also revealed a preference for private over public clouds with about 60 percent preferring private cloud infrastructure over public clouds for data security. The survey of more than 180 healthcare professionals, which provides current cloud adoption trends and future cloud deployment insights, also revealed that 85 percent of all healthcare organizations now have at least one service in the cloud.

Data security

Data security is an ongoing concern for IT and this year’s survey asked respondents where they felt their data was safest under three common risk scenarios: environmental disasters, malicious attacks (e.g. cyberattacks) and hardware failure.

For environmental disasters – 61 percent felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 27.5 percent in a public cloud and 11.5 percent on premise.

For malicious attacks, 58.5 percent preferred a private cloud to safeguard their data versus 32 percent on premise and 9.5 percent public cloud.

For hardware malfunctions 58.5 percent preferred private clouds compared to 24 percent public cloud and 17.5 percent on premises.

Services in the cloud

Other key results of the survey showed that, on average, healthcare organizations have between 2 and three services (2.75 average) in the cloud. Data backup, servers/data centers, other SaaS and Microsoft Exchange and Office were cited as the top deployed cloud services. Additionally, the survey indicated that adoption will continue to be strong, with 81 percent of respondents planning on adding new or additional cloud services in the next three years.

The survey results also found that 38.75 percent of organizations had deployed a cloud solution on their own versus using a third party provider. This is markedly lower than the average of all industries of 54.75 percent. When asked if they had to start the deployment over, nearly a third (32.5 percent) said they would outsource to a solution provider the next time.

Additional findings

• 42 percent of survey respondents noted that network access was a pain point for their organization yet just 22 percent had evaluated SD-WAN technology as a solution.
• The overwhelming majority of respondents indicated HIPAA compliance requirements (85 percent). In addition, 32 percent also faced PCI compliance requirements.
• The top services survey respondents expect to deploy in the cloud over the next three years include data backup (48 percent), Exchange / Office (27.5 percent) and phone systems (27 percent).