The cloud can be a great place to host your healthcare workloads and data. But since anything healthcare-related is often subject to specific compliance requirements, factoring compliance into your cloud strategy is especially important when dealing with healthcare data and applications.
With this need in mind, read on for a look at five best practices for healthcare cloud compliance.
Compliance Challenges for Healthcare Workloads in the Cloud
Most health care data is subject to compliance rules, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (Hibaa), which requires data (as well as any applications that manage the data) to be managed and secured in specific ways. For this reason, compliance is critical when running healthcare workloads in the cloud.
It is worth noting that, in general, healthcare compliance rules are not particularly specific when it comes to: how Cloud environments need to be configured. After all, rules like those in the Portable Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act date back to the 1990s, long before anyone thought about it. Cloud computingThis means that interpreting compliance rules and figuring out how to meet them in the cloud is an exercise that falls to cloud administrators and developers in many cases. There is no simple set of configuration rules to follow, or cloud services to implement, to ensure compliance.
Best Practices for Cloud Compliance in Healthcare
However, there are some clear, high-level practices you should follow to ensure cloud compliance in the healthcare context.
1. Adopting the zero trust principle
Distrust It is a security strategy that involves configuring resources to distrust each other by default. Zero trust is useful in a variety of contexts, not just those related to healthcare and compliance.
But it’s especially valuable as part of a healthcare cloud compliance strategy because it helps mitigate the risk of sensitive healthcare data being exposed to the wrong parties. As a best practice for configuring cloud access controls, start with zero trust by default, and grant access only when and where it’s specifically necessary.
2. Educate cloud engineers about compliance
Healthcare compliance laws like HIPAA are so widely known that it's easy to assume that everyone is familiar with their requirements—or can look them up easily enough.
But in reality, as we mentioned above, compliance regulations tend to be very vague when it comes to the cloud. That’s why investing in healthcare compliance education and training for engineers responsible for setting up and managing cloud environments is critical. Education should not only provide an understanding of how laws like HIPAA work at a high level, but also how the organization interprets HIPAA requirements and how engineers need to apply them in the cloud.
3. Use cloud DLP to protect data
Prevent Cloud Data Loss (DLP) is a type of software that can automatically detect sensitive data within the cloud. As part of a cloud healthcare compliance strategy, DLP plays a critical role by helping teams find sensitive healthcare data that they may have accidentally stored in a location (such as an unsecured object storage bucket in a cloud service like Amazon S3) that is not compliant with healthcare regulations governing the data.
4. Consider local storage options
It is a mistake to think that the cloud is less secure or less compliant than on-premises infrastructure. When properly configured and monitored, cloud environments are just as secure as on-premises alternatives.
However, local environments do provide some controls, such as the ability to: Air gap datawhich is not typically available in public clouds. These capabilities can be useful when dealing with sensitive healthcare data that you are unlikely to have to access frequently—this may be the case if, for example, a compliance rule requires you to keep archived healthcare records for a specified period of time.
5. Simplify your cloud architecture
There is a lot to be said about the benefits of Multi-cloud And Hybrid Cloud But when it comes to meeting healthcare compliance requirements in the cloud, simple is often better — and the simplest type of cloud architecture is one that is oriented around a single cloud.
There’s no reason why you can’t implement a more complex cloud strategy to support your healthcare workloads if you want to. But if your security and compliance capabilities are limited, consider sticking with a simpler cloud architecture to reduce risk.
Conclusion
It’s certainly possible to take full advantage of the cloud to host your healthcare applications or data. But you’ll need to take additional precautions to ensure healthcare cloud compliance — such as making zero trust a priority across your cloud environment, investing in data loss prevention tools to protect sensitive data, and favoring simplicity over complexity to reduce cloud compliance risks.
