The healthcare industry depends on patient data for retrieving history information and curing patients with personalized treatments. Such data holds value worth millions and billions on the black market, which is often the target of cybercriminals. These attackers look for loopholes and vulnerabilities in the healthcare system to penetrate and breach sensitive patient data.
However, numerous healthcare practitioners are making patient data and its subsequent integrity a priority and focusing on safeguarding it with cloud migration services. They are modernizing their legacy systems and porting them to a cloud environment where system penetration by intelligent threats becomes impossible. This being said, it also raises the concern about safely migrating patient records.
Shielding the patient data and information during the migration requires a strategy that concentrates on the security aspect. Keeping that in mind, we bring forth the strategies businesses and decision makers must utilize when migrating to the cloud. This list brings forth all the necessary steps you should take when working with healthcare patient data.
Strategies to Focus on During Transformation With Cloud Migration Services
As mentioned above, healthcare-focused data poses sensitive information about the lives of patients that, if released, can cause them discomfort. This needs to be safeguarded at all phases of modernization. With a cloud transformation services provider, healthcare practitioners can get industry-wide valuable insights into migration and follow the necessary strategies that keep the data safe. They can assist you in making data-focused decisions that are resourceful in terms of keeping the solutions safe from possible data breaches.
Considering that these strategies reduce the probability of cyber threats, it is high time you take a look at them and bring them into use with healthcare data migration.
1. Conduct a Security Risk Assessment
The priority of the hour for data integrity relies on the risk assessment. Legacy systems have unnoticed vulnerabilities that can be targeted by a criminal threat at the time of migration. However, when decision makers make a security risk assessment and evaluation check, they identify such anomalies and report for further implementation and safety remediation. That being said, you should focus on assessing the healthcare system for security loopholes.
2. Build a Safety-Focused Migration Plan
Security patch issues and downtime during the cloud transformation services are considered hindrances. For instance, when healthcare practitioners move their workflow to the cloud, they often go all at once and cause downtime problems. Furthermore, an unsystematic plan leaves room for issues with data transfer, storage, and accessibility that open a window for data breaches.
To eliminate these factors, decision-makers focus on migration plans that are safety-focused and consider HIPAA compliance throughout. This way, the plan reduces the possibilities of downtimes and possible breach cases.
3. Hire a Cloud Migration Services Provider
As we mentioned above, migration without valuable assistance can be long and let go suspected vulnerabilities as a backdoor. That being said, it is always suggested to healthcare decision makers to consider in the factor of hiring a migration service provider.
These companies have an understanding of the necessary remediation plans and patchwork that needs to be done prior to the migration. This way, they keep your modernization project in check and ensure the stability while focusing on keeping the patient’s healthcare and sensitive data secure.
4. Implement Strong Data Encryption Techniques
Cybercriminals look for endpoint anomalies during the migration process for a small window. This window can occur during the process when data is stored or transferred. Such hardware anomalies cause healthcare practitioners to lose data and damage their reputation.
However, in these cases, it is preferred to have data encryption techniques in place. Strong practices like Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are needed they halt unauthorized access during cloud transformation services.
5. Ensure Access Control With RBAC and MFA
As unauthorized access is associated with potential data breaches, the cloud migration process for the patient’s data transfer must have a secure authentication system. Regardless of trust, healthcare practitioners must consider the outsider and insider leaks are equally dangerous for patient data.
In such cases, the zero-trust architecture needs to be in place to defend against cyberattacks. This architecture brings in the implementation of multi-factor authentication and role-based access control. Such system requires authentication everytime someone enters the system and if a breach is found, can be tracked back to stop the attack right in time during the migration process.
6. Making Sure About the Security Updates
Over the time period of data storage and sharing, healthcare systems may come across vulnerabilities that were previously not in place. These anomalies, if found by the attackers, can result in a data breach, reputation damage, or worse, a hefty penalty.
In such cases, it is expected from the decision makers to have a regular security update to spot risks fast and respond to them with an immediate remediation plan.
Conclusion
As we wind up the strategy planning in the context of patient data security, it is hoped that our methods assist you in safeguarding during the cloud migration services. As mentioned above, selecting a reliable service provider is crucial in such cases.