It’s no surprise that one of healthcare leaders’ biggest fears is having customer data stolen, leaked or exposed. As large healthcare breaches hit record highs, hacks are affecting more individual records than ever – 136 million in 2023, more than double the previous year. This has triggered a wave of class action lawsuits, disruptions in billing cycles, and major service impacts at healthcare institutions.
Given this backdrop, healthcare organizations are doing everything they can to keep data protected and reduce cyber risks. It’s been a struggle for leaders in a heavily regulated, risk-averse industry that’s been historically slow to adopt new technology. Many are adopting a new strategy – taking advantage of cloud computing not only to streamline procedures but also to improve security in their software development environments.
Cloud is transforming every industry. In healthcare, cloud-based solutions are helping institutions improve collaboration, lower costs, roll out telehealth options and make data more interoperable. McKinsey projects that cloud health solutions will generate between $100 billion and $170 billion in additional value by 2030.
Shifting software development to the cloud is a tactic that’s gaining popularity in regulated environments like healthcare. In a new report, Gartner projects that by 2027, 40% of organizations in highly regulated verticals will mandate the use of Cloud Development Environments (CDEs), up from less than 10% in 2024.
For most organizations, CDEs’ main draw is their ability to improve developer experiences. Decoupling the development workspace from the physical workstation makes it easier for organizations to onboard developers, reduce friction in everyday tasks and provide more consistent configurations across their environments.
But CDEs offer security and compliance advantages, as well. Centralizing access to and storage of critical healthcare resources gives platform and security teams greater governance over how source code and sensitive data is both accessed and shared across systems.
Organizations are starting to recognize how shifting development to the cloud can help them improve their security postures.
Security Policies
When developers are left to provision and maintain their local development environments, they may not follow (or be aware of) internal security guidelines. The onus is on them to configure and manage their tools to comply with organizational regulations. Information is usually on FAQ documents, wikis, or checklists, and it all has to be configured manually.
This can lead to inconsistent security practices. It becomes more difficult for administrators to enforce best practices like updating their local tools in a timely manner when a vulnerability is exposed. In CDE environments, vulnerabilities can be patched in minutes, rather than waiting for independent developers to roll the patches themselves.
Compliance
For healthcare institutions, ensuring data sovereignty and compliance with regulatory standards (like GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS) can be difficult when data is distributed across numerous decentralized machines. CDEs help hospitals and payers comply with HIPAA and GDPR regulations by allowing them to self-host their development environments. This ensures that sensitive data and source code remain within their secure cloud or on-prem locations.
The continued rise in ransomware, phishing and AI-based cyber attacks across industries is forcing healthcare operators to adopt new security strategies. Decoupling software development environments from the desktop gives healthcare a valuable tool to protect the lifeblood of their businesses: patient data.
About Tim Quinlan
Tim Quinlan has been a Linux geek since the 1.x days and is currently a Sr. Technical Manager at Coder. His days are spent spreading the word on Coder’s Open-Source cloud development environment to help keep developers all around the world in flow.