Long-time readers of Healthcare IT Today will know that we love good infographics here at the office. There is nothing better than interesting statistics delivered in a compact, visually appealing format.
The Center for Connected Medicine (CCM), based in Pittsburgh and part of UPMC, recently released a “State of Cloud Cybersecurity in Health Care” infographic based on a survey of healthcare business and IT leaders.
Two statistics stood out.
Less than 10% can point to a cloud security incident in the past 12 months
Based on the survey, only 7% of respondents could point to an incident, with the remaining 93% unsure or believing they had no issues. The 7% seems low, especially when compared to data from other industries:
- Banks face 85 serious attempts to breach cyber defenses each year and 36% of those attacks succeed in stealing some data [Accenture]
- 54% of companies experienced an industrial control system security incident [CSO Online]
- 61% of organizations have experienced an IoT security incident [CSO Online]
So if 36% of attacks on banks succeed and only 7% of healthcare can point to an incident…that means healthcare is either 5 times better at preventing attacks (unlikely) or we remain blissfully unaware of successful cyber security incidents.
Note: the CCM survey specifically focuses on cloud incidents whereas the Accenture study wasn’t specific to cloud.
Less than 20% of healthcare organizations use public cloud infrastructure
According to the survey by CCM, healthcare organizations have not adopted public cloud infrastructure.
- For electronic health records, 7% use public cloud only and 13% use a combination of public + private cloud
- For physician notes, 5% use public cloud only and 12% use public + private cloud
The low adoption of public cloud represents a significant market opportunity for tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon who provide the three most popular public cloud platforms. I suspect that in 5-7 years we will see fewer private cloud installations in healthcare, which can be more expensive to maintain vs public cloud infrastructure.
To learn more about the CCM survey results and to listen to a discussion on cloud cybersecurity in healthcare, click here.
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