Average Healthcare Organization Uploads 6.8 TB Of Data Monthly
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The average healthcare organization uses 928 cloud services, introducing high risks.
A Skyhigh Networks’ report reveals the average healthcare organization uses 928 cloud services and uploads 6.8 TB of data a month. Skyhigh’s CloudTrust Program found only seven percent of cloud services meet enterprise security and compliance requirements, and only 15.4 percent support multi-factor authentication. Additionally, 2.8 percent have ISO 27001 certification and 9.4 percent encrypt data stored at rest meaning enormous amounts of healthcare date could be at risk.
The Cloud Adoption and Risk in Healthcare Report is based on actual usage data from more than 1.6 million healthcare provider and payer employees and is the only report on how healthcare organizations are using the cloud. This includes the number of cloud services the average organization uses, the top cloud apps, and the number of compromised account credentials for healthcare employees.
The report also enumerates the top 20 enterprise and consumer cloud services in healthcare and demonstrates how prolific a single employee can be in terms of cloud usage and high-risk behavior.
The average healthcare organization employee uses 188 collaboration services, which includes Microsoft Office 365, Gmail, and Evernote, a practice that can create silos and impeded collaborations. They also use, on average, 62 development services (think SourceForge or GitHub), 37 content sharing services (YouTube and LiveLeak), 33 social media services (Facebook and Twitter), and 31 file sharing services (Dropbox and Google Drive).
Now take the average healthcare employee, who utilizes an average of 26 unique cloud services, including eight collaboration services, four file-sharing services, four social media services, and four content sharing services. The most prolific healthcare user identified in the study used 444 cloud services, 136 of which are high-risk (30.6 percent). To put that into perspective, across all cloud services in use globally, only 5.6 percent are high-risk.
What makes this more dangerous, according to the report, is that each employee is being track by at least four marketing analytics and advertising services on average, which are increasingly being used by cyber criminals to find sites frequently by healthcare employees. Thus informed, criminals can compromise those sites to ultimately launch a “watering hole attack” to get to and compromise a healthcare organization.
Skyhigh found that 89.2 percent of healthcare organizations have exposure to compromised credentials. While this number is lower than the overall average of 91.7 percent across all industries, 14.4 percent of healthcare employees have at least one compromised credential, compared with just 11.2 percent across all industries.