Stepping into the cloud should feel like progress for healthcare organizations—but it also comes with a new set of challenges that can’t be ignored. In a recent Forbes article, Forbes council member and Aviatrix’s chief product officer Chris McHenry breaks down why the industry needs a major shift in how it thinks about cloud security and compliance. The old “build a wall around the data center” mindset is outdated, especially when 276 million health records were breached in 2024 alone.
Healthcare systems are moving massive platforms like Epic’s EHR into the public cloud to boost performance, support telehealth and expand AI capabilities. All of that is promising, but fewer than half of IT leaders feel confident managing these new environments—meaning misconfigurations and blind spots are almost guaranteed. Regulators are tightening the rules too, with expected HIPAA updates calling for mandatory MFA, strong encryption, ongoing penetration testing and tighter network segmentation.
The core issue? Cloud environments don’t behave like on-prem networks. Workloads shift constantly, APIs connect to external partners and staff access apps from anywhere, creating a much wider attack surface. Recent incidents—like the Change Healthcare ransomware attack and Shields Healthcare Group breach—show how fast things can spiral without proper visibility and segmentation. McHenry’s take is straightforward: the future belongs to organizations that rethink security from the ground up. That means adopting zero trust, segmenting workloads, encrypting everything, automating compliance and gaining real-time insight into where PHI travels. He concludes that the cloud can absolutely transform care and innovation—but only if security evolves right along with it.
