News Feature | April 4, 2016

Healthcare Industry Increasingly Turns To The Cloud

Katie Wike

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Moving Your Small Practice Health IT Clients To Cloud EHR Solutions

According to Dell research, healthcare continues to increasingly adopt cloud applications despite security concerns.

A recent Dell report, The 2015 Global Technology Adoption Index, shows healthcare organizations are continuing to increasingly adopt the cloud despite security risks.

Health IT Security reports adoption of cloud technology increased from 25 percent in 2014 to 41 percent in 2015 in the healthcare field. “These findings suggest that the C-level has to be more engaged when it comes to integrating data security strategies into their business,” Steve Lalla, vice president of Commercial Client Software & Solutions for Dell said. “Business leaders understand the need to invest in their security infrastructure, but that isn’t translating into updating or expanding their current systems to adequately prevent modern attacks.”

Additionally, Dell found the use of private on premise cloud services in healthcare, such as email, access to databases, disaster recovery, and human resources rose 4 percentage points to 46 percent in 2015.

“While we’ve come a long way from the days when cybersecurity was an add-on to the IT infrastructure in organizations, more work needs to be done,” Michael Kaiser, Executive Director of National Cyber Security Alliance said in a statement. “The Dell Data Security Survey highlights that as the security landscape evolves, and threats become more sophisticated, organizations need to foster a culture of cybersecurity awareness from the top down and integrate it throughout their organization.”

Security concerns were still prominent, in fact:

  • 65 percent of mid-market companies are hindering their plans to add more mobility service because of security reasons
  • four out of five respondents are concerned with uploading information to a cloud service
  • 58 percent are more concerned with data security than they were in 2014
  • 58 percent of decision makers believe that a lack of trained security professionals adversely affects their organizations
  • 49 percent believe they need to do more to secure their data in the next five years

“Security has been a major barrier to cloud adoption in many verticals, but it’s especially critical in heavily regulated industries and plays a major role in such organizations’ decisions to move their data into a public cloud app,” the report’s authors wrote.