Multi-cloud could cure healthcare’s security woes

• Multi-cloud adoption in healthcare is rising swiftly due to security and compliance needs, a new Nutanix report shows

• In an interview, a healthcare CIO told Fierce Network using multiple cloud providers reduces risks like single points of failure and improves data management

• AI might also bring promise for healthcare security, though its use also raises ethical concerns

Multi-cloud could be the new frontier for healthcare organizations hoping to get away from increasing and evolving cybercrime attacks on the sector.

A new report from Nutanix found the use of hybrid multi-cloud models among healthcare organizations has jumped from 6% last year to 16%, and estimated that figure will double over the next one to three years.

Security and compliance are the biggest reasons enterprises relocate their applications to a different infrastructure, according to the report. Nearly all healthcare respondents (98%) said they moved at least one workload last year because of security concerns.

This trend, fueled by evolving security needs, is a response to the surge in ransomware attacks targeting hospitals—46 systems fell victim in 2023, up from 25 in 2022.

Top concerns for IT professionals in the sector include data management, sovereignty and security in the cloud. In the Nutanix survey, 73% of the respondents reported using multiple IT models, a sizeable jump from 53% last year. That means they might use a combination of on-premises IT, private and public cloud infrastructure.

Isaiah Nathaniel, VP & CIO of Delaware Valley Community Health Inc., said public clouds can be a place to evacuate sensitive data that usually lives on-prem in the case of a security incident, without disrupting essential services.

“If an event were to occur from a security perspective, we can cut off access with one click and/or we can move things to other data centers,” he explained.

Spreading workloads across multiple cloud providers mitigates the risk of a single point of failure, offering resilience in the face of outages or breaches. It also enables data segregation based on regulatory and sensitivity requirements.

Delaware Valley Community Heath leverages cloud providers including Microsoft Azure, AWS, HYCU and Tableau, Nathaniel said.

Uneasy AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has broad applicability in the healthcare sector, and according to the Nutanix survey, IT pros consider it both a priority and a challenge. 

AI tied as the top IT infrastructure purchase criterion among healthcare organizations, with 84% of healthcare organizations stating they were increasing investments in AI strategy in the coming year. The same group, however, largely considered running AI to be a challenge (82%).

When moving sensitive data from one cloud to another, Nathaniel said AI can automatically shift workloads between public and private cloud infrastructure depending on what event is taking place. For example, if his healthcare center loses power in Philadelphia, Nathaniel can program AI to shift data to a public cloud and still have point of care activities.

While AI holds promise, ethical concerns loom large in a sector like healthcare where private and sensitive data informs critical decisions. It's a prospect Nathaniel said makes him "uneasy."

He warned that for it to work, IT teams need to understand what dataset is actually behind the AI they’re using. That includes making sure that information is up to date. "You can't have your doctors prescribing on information that's from 2009, medicine has changed since then," he said.

AI algorithms should also trained on diverse datasets to mitigate bias and ensure fairness in decision-making.

“AI is here, and AI is here to stay. But we want it to be ethical,” Nathaniel said. “We want it to be from a secure perspective, and we want it to be logical in terms of understanding of the data set.”

No security expense spared 

For healthcare IT, cost is taking a backseat to data protection and innovation.

Nutanix’ respondents identified AI and the flexibility to move workloads back and forth across private and public cloud infrastructure as the most important factor driving purchasing decisions at 17%. This was followed in importance by the performance potential of the infrastructure (14%) and how well it lends itself to successful data sovereignty and privacy management (14%).

When healthcare organizations are investing in IT infrastructure, next year’s budgets reflect these priorities.

Scott Ragsdale, Senior Director of Sales, U.S. Healthcare at Nutanix, said over the last two years cost has become less of a concern for many CIOs and CTOs in healthcare. The proportion that reported cost as a top concern was down 7% this year, after decreasing the year before as well.

“CIOs are less concerned about cost, as the value of the data they're trying to protect increases,” Ragsdale told Fierce Network.

As a CIO himself, Nathaniel said he is “sparing no thought and sparing no expense” when it comes to shielding his facility from the modern threat landscape.

“At the end of the day, that's a patient on the end of that infiltration. In healthcare, we know we will be attacked, so we have to do everything in our power to protect that information," he concluded.