Thirty-two percent of healthcare organizations store a wide range of sensitive data in the cloud, including healthcare data and personally identifiable information (PII) of customers and employees.

The 2019 Netwrix Cloud Data Security Report revealed that 32% of healthcare organizations store a wide range of sensitive data in the cloud, including healthcare data and personally identifiable information (PII) of customers and employees. In addition, the number of those who are ready to adopt Cloud-First approach has increased by 31% since 2018, and the number considering becoming 100% cloud-based has grown by 12%. Unfortunately, their IT teams might not have enough resources to properly protect this sensitive data in the cloud, as 85% of them did not see an increase in their cloud security budgets in 2019.

Other findings revealed by the research include:

• 26% of healthcare organizations had at least one security incident in the cloud during the past 12 months. These organizations have two things in common: None of them classified all the data they stored in the cloud, and all of them store all their sensitive data in the cloud.
• The majority of IT teams at healthcare organizations plan to strengthen data security in the cloud by encrypting data (70%) and monitoring activities around data (50%). However, one third of them do not receive any financial support from their management, which makes it more difficult for them to improve security in the cloud.
• 18% of healthcare organizations would consider moving their data from the cloud back on premises. Their main reasons include security concerns (56%), reliability and performance issues (22%), and high costs (22%) for the cloud. If they decide to make this move, they will start by migrating healthcare data (33%), customer data (33%) and employee data (11%).