Cybersecurity poses big challenges, but new cloud approaches hold promise

As healthcare organizations gets more comfortable with the idea of cloud migration, many hospitals and health systems are finding that the security demands of this new paradigm are different than they may have expected.

As Dr. John Halamka, new president of Mayo Clinic Platform, noted at the Healthcare Security Forum in Boston earlier this month, “Perhaps 80% of what a traditional IT or cybersecurity person knows today is irrelevant when moving to the cloud. It’s effectively an entirely new job."

Mayo Clinic and Google recently inked a major new 10-year deal that will see the Minnesota health system hosting its data with Google Cloud – which in turn will help Mayo’s clinicians and researchers develop an array of cloud and machine learning tools to help solve a variety of complex health challenges.

Amy Waldron, director of Google Cloud Healthcare & Life Sciences, also spoke at the Healthcare Security Forum. And she offered an update of what Google is doing to help make the cloud a safer choice for healthcare organization of all shapes and sizes.