- Understanding HIPAA-Compliant Cloud Options for Health IT
The DecptionGrid lays down a decoy barrier between an organization’s cloud assets and the attacker. The decoy assets appear to the attacker as real assets, absorbing the attacks. The decoy then alerts the organization to the attack so it can take steps to eliminate potential threats.
Healthcare organizations are migrating more and more data into the cloud, which calls for more visibility and control over their IT infrastructure.
Security solutions that can detect attacks as they are happening are critical to avoiding HIPAA violations and protecting PHI.
Healthcare organizations can be wary of HIPAA violations that could potentially stem from cloud technology. One of the biggest drawbacks to utilizing the cloud is how IT departments may have to give up various degrees of control, although it will depend which kind of service model is being deployed.
This lack of control, along with HIPAA compliance issues, is a significant reason why some healthcare organizations are hesitant to embrace cloud.
Solutions that take a more proactive approach to cloud security are becoming more popular in healthcare. Security net approaches, threat intelligence, and security information and event management (SIEM) help organizations gain much needed visibility into cloud environments.
Both threat intelligence and SIEM give organizations visibility by producing massive amounts of data.
Threat intelligence is evidence-based knowledge that gives organizations insight into emerging and potential threats. This allows them to make informed decisions about how to protect their network from current and possible future threats.
A recent survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute indicated that threat intelligence is seen as valuable and necessary for organizations that experience a high volume of cybersecurity threats. Many organizations struggle with how to deploy and manage the technology, but they still see the value in having it as part of their IT infrastructure security.
The report predicted that organizations will be more successful with threat intelligence in the coming year as long as they identify resources and techniques that will help maximize threat intelligence effectiveness.
SIEM is another security solution that can help organizations gain more visibility into their cloud environments.
SIEM presents event data in a single view from security devices, network infrastructure, systems and applications, as well as log data and network packets. The event data is combined with context information on the user and network vulnerabilities.
SIEM solutions are made up of security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) technology. The solution is deployed to provide advanced threat detection, basic security monitoring, and forensics and incident response.
While SIEM solutions are effective, they are also complex to manage and take an experienced professional to monitor.
Security solutions that give organizations more visibility into their health IT infrastructure allow them to be more proactive while detecting threats. Cyber attackers have less of a chance of gaining access to PHI if they can be stopped before they reach the data.
Whether organizations opt for the cloud, SIEM solutions, or other types of threat intelligence, they need to ensure they are choosing an option that best fits their security needs.
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