In recent years, cloud computing has become more ubiquitous, even surpassing local computing in many cases. As such, cloud-based programs and services are now commonly used in consumer phones, computers, and smart devices. Aside from casual use, cloud computing also impacted the essential divisions of society, especially the healthcare industry. If you’re interested in learning more, please read on. In the following sections, we’ll discuss the benefits of cloud computing for the healthcare sector.

1) Faster services
In the healthcare industry, efficiency is as essential as the work to accomplish. As such, doctors, drug manufacturers, and illness prevention departments should always stay on schedule or go ahead in time if possible. Why? Since many lives and the public’s health are at stake, every second counts and can potentially change things.

While local computing works, it’s not as efficient as the newer cloud standard. With the latter, healthcare companies can process data and transfer information instantly. Also, workers can complete their tasks remotely, removing the need to wait for slow servers or travel to a specific office to access files or information. Going back, this is all possible thanks to the cloud’s powerful processing, faster servers, and ease of access.

2) Improved collaboration
Aside from efficiency, collaboration is also a vital part of every healthcare company. In hospitals, doctors, nurses, and other staff need to accurately transfer and receive information like patients’ data and other related things. However, local servers and programs are slow to process data, get easily congested with multiple user access, or don’t have effective remote and collaboration functions.

Thankfully, cloud computing supports both consumer and specialized programs. In detail, a healthcare company can choose to deploy its applications to a cloud provider or subscribe to a commercial service. Accordingly, healthcare workers can now send, upload, and access files in varying formats and sizes remotely, converse via chat, call, or video feed, and use more collaboration methods.

3) Cost-efficient operations
While it’s not commonly known, organizations can save money when choosing cloud computing over local processing. First, the former removes the need to hire people to maintain and solve issues of local servers as cloud providers ensure their platforms are always up and running. Next, the cost of repairs and maintenance most of the time outweighs the expense of paying for cloud subscriptions monthly.

Apart from that, it’s also now more practical to get a cloud platform package than build an entire server system in an organization. Besides, most will favor the faster cloud deployment than waiting for weeks or months to complete and potentially troubleshoot a local system. Lastly, as cloud computing is excellent at scaling, a healthcare company will only need to buy the space or computing power it requires. Also, when downgrading, there’s no need to throw away potential hardware as cloud providers offer easy downgrade plans with cost reductions.

4) Enhanced patient care efficiency
Cloud computing can enhance patient care in many ways. When accepting new patients, doctors and staff can quickly check the online database to check a person’s potential existing medical records. As a result, they can spend more time on actual consultations and not on the paperwork.

Next, a hospital can efficiently distribute patient information like condition, status, schedules, and medication to nurses and doctors. Besides that, with version control, workers can also avoid information inaccuracy when data mixes with other groups or new entries overlap existing ones. Regardless, these benefits enable medical workers to attend to patients easily and on time.

5) Better data management
If a healthcare organization uses local computing, chances are, it only has limited methods of storing and accessing data. As such, since offline databases are more constrained, they can restrict users to access faster or do things they can typically perform on commercial programs.

With cloud computing, that same organization can improve its data management methods. How? As cloud providers employ powerful technologies, it’s now possible to store more complex data and file types without worrying about slow down or errors. Additionally, organizing massive data collections won’t be as hard compared to doing it on a local server. Above all, healthcare workers can instantly upload/access information and files remotely without messing up the system or waiting for queues and slow loading times.

6) Improved privacy
Unlike offline processing, cloud computing provides more privacy and security for the healthcare sector. Given how cloud platforms use high-level encryption, multiple stacks of protection, and superior threat detection methods, it’s harder for criminals to infiltrate a healthcare company’s system.

However, relying on cloud computing for privacy isn’t enough. As the world is living in the modern digital age, it’s essential to become aware and preventive against data loss.

Thus, it’s not ideal to answer strange calls, emails, or messages outside the official apps and software of the organization, where a sender pretends to represent the hospital. Also, individuals could use Spokeo, an email search and reverse number lookup tool, to avoid hackers, scammers, and criminals. Using Spokeo’s email lookup tool and phone lookup features, you could verify a caller or sender’s hospital connection or learn about social profiles and criminal records.

Cloud Computing For Healthcare – What’s Beyond?
While cloud computing is not yet fully adopted, its potential will surely affect and change things in the near future. Moreover, although the healthcare sector only uses the cloud for collaboration and data management today, it will help medical workers in more ways soon. Aside from automation, cloud computing can also help medication, surgical operations, drug creation, and many more.

Given how fast the technology is progressing, only time will tell how close cloud companies will introduce supercomputers or even quantum ones. If that happens, the healthcare sector will surely benefit from better disease detection and identification, understanding of genetic mutation, and maybe even discover cures for many illnesses. Regardless, the future still depends on how hospitals and organizations react, keep an open mind, and adopt new technologies.

The Wyoming Department of Health knows it accidentally published the personal information of 164,000 residents on a public website earlier this year. But it remains a mystery as to whether any bad actors accessed the data before the department discovered the mistake and took the files offline.

The roughly 54 files that were uploaded to GitHub.com contained names, dates of birth, addresses, some driver’s license numbers and results for COVID-19 and alcohol breath tests.

Between the data’s upload in January and deletion in March, roughly 13 IP addresses appear to have accessed the data in some form or fashion, Department of Health Interim Director Stefan Johansson said Thursday.

“We cannot determine who that was or if these were web crawlers that comb all websites basically all the time,” Johansson told the Legislature’s Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Committee. “That’s something that we don’t know.”

It’s possible that no one obtained a copy of the data before it was scrubbed from the internet. However, under federal regulations and the department’s policies, “we assume the worst and we act as if the worst had happened,” Johansson said.

If a malicious actor did obtain the data files, they could potentially use the information for “online targeting,” Johansson said, such as by trying to gain access to a person’s social media accounts or deploying some kind of phishing scam to obtain more sensitive and potentially lucrative information. The interim director noted that “the highly sensitive data” — such as Social Security numbers, insurance and financial information — “was not involved in this.”

For the roughly 164,000 people whose personal information was publicly exposed, the department is offering identity theft protection services and operating a phone line to field questions.

After the department publicly announced the breach, a scammer or group of scammers tried to capitalize, posing as the department in phone calls and trying to convince residents to give up their personal information. The department quickly issued a warning to the public.

“We tried to do our best to put out information … to make sure that hopefully they knew that we would never call and ask for that type of information, even after an event like this,” Johansson said.

As for how the data breach occurred, Johansson said the department had been using the website GitHub to manage and update computer code related to various public health data reporting requirements. However, when posting a long string of code, one analyst failed to include a certain “NOR function” that would have told the program to skip over the sensitive files, Johansson said. Without that function, the sensitive files were instead called and uploaded to GitHub’s public repository, he said.

The error “was absolutely inadvertent and accidental,” the interim director added. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he said the department threw a lot of work and a lot of employees at public health efforts — and in that environment, “you run the risk of making mistakes.”

“We’ve all equated it somewhat to wartime,” Johansson said, “and I think that’s part of the reason that you risk some quality measures slipping. And that’s certainly what happened here.”

Two employees were involved with the breach: One no longer works for the Department of Health, while the other “has received sanctions, additional training, and progessive disciplinary actions have been taken,” Johansson said.

Department of Health Director Mike Ceballos and state Chief Information Officer Gordon Knopp both resigned in the wake of the breach, though they did not announce whether their departures were directly related to the incident.

Although the breach was “certainly not the fault of the platform” — Johansson in fact made a point of praising the site for its help — he said the department is no longer using GitHub for any purposes. The department also reviewed and updated all of its privacy and security policies, including how often they train employees on best practices.

March 04, 2021 – Highmark Health and Verily recently announced a strategic collaboration with Verily that will build on its going partnership with Google Cloud to foster patient empowerment and digital transformation.

The latest strategic collaboration with Google Cloud’s sister company Verily will develop Highmark Health’s Living Health model, which is designed to deliver personalized healthcare to patients and allow clinicians to focus on the specific needs of each patient.

Additionally, the model seeks to eliminate the fragmentation in healthcare and re-engineers the healthcare delivery model to provide seamless, simpler, and smarter customer experience.

The Pennsylvania-based healthcare organization has already signed up for a six-year collaboration with Google Cloud to support the Living Health Model in December.

“We believe the collaboration with Verily and Google Cloud is the ideal trifecta of expertise that will enable us to create and deliver a remarkable health experience for patients through a holistic, digitally-enabled, personalized set of solutions, while also enabling clinicians, supported by a person’s health team, to focus on the specific needs of each patient and intervene at the right time to proactively prevent disease or its progression,” Karen Hanlon, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Highmark Health, said in the announcement.

Verily will provide digitally-enabled care solutions to manage chronic conditions, with potential focus areas including include congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Additionally, Verily will provide a clinical insights platform that will allow Highmark Health to use data to guide patients through personalized pathways for care.

Verily’s advanced analytics and Highmark Health’s clinical insights and expertise will be refined through a robust test-and-learn environment to build evidence and clinical validation for condition-specific solutions, Highmark Health said.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Highmark across Verily’s health platforms to serve the needs of both patients and clinicians. By providing actionable insights for patients and clinicians, the tools we build together will make the experience of health care more engaging and effective for all,” said Vivian Lee, MD, president of health platforms at Verily and chair of the board of Onduo, a subsidiary of Verily.

Verily and Onduo will collaborate with Google Cloud to integrate chronic disease solutions into Highmark’s Living Health model and the Living Health Dynamic Platform, which is currently being built on Google Cloud.

Overall, the Living Health model will enable clinicians to determine the appropriate next set of personalized actions for each patient. It will consider comorbidities, patient interests and goals, and more.

The chronic disease solutions will also extend care outside of the traditional clinical setting, which will integrate virtual care, digitally-enabled devices, and coaching to support patients in-between visits.

Built on top of Google Cloud’s secure, reliable infrastructure, privacy and security are a guiding principle of the Living Health model, Highmark Health explained. The company controls access and use of its patient data using rigorous, organizational privacy controls and governance.

“This partnership is truly symbiotic,” said Tony Farah, MD, executive vice president and chief medical and clinical transformation officer of Highmark Health.

“Together, we will drive transformational and more sustainable change, and we will do it faster than we could working separately. Together with Google Cloud and Verily’s consumer experience and technology, we will deliver the scale needed to provide more people and their health teams access to the most cutting edge digital and analytic tools to improve their health using a simplified and seamless approach,” Farah continued.

JEDI Contract Put on Hold

The U.S. Department of Defense’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract was placed on hold in mid-2019, following public statements from President Trump suggesting the bidding process may have favored Amazon Web Services. According to reporting by Politico at the time, the pause opened the door for rival bidders to reassert their positions. Oracle had been among the most vocal opponents of the contracting process, arguing publicly against Amazon’s perceived advantage. With Amazon’s frontrunner status now under scrutiny, Microsoft was seen as positioned to mount a stronger challenge for what would have been one of the largest U.S. government cloud contracts on record.

Azure Dedicated Host: Single-Tenant Physical Servers for Compliance

Azure Compute principal program manager Ziv Rafalovich announced the preview of Azure Dedicated Host, a service that deploys Windows and Linux virtual machines onto a single-tenant physical server. Unlike standard multi-tenant VM deployments, Dedicated Host gives organizations full visibility and control over the underlying hardware, which is particularly valuable for regulated industries that must demonstrate workload isolation for compliance audits.

Key features announced at the time included:

• Azure Hybrid Benefit extension: Customers with existing on-premises SQL Server and Windows Server licenses can apply Azure Hybrid Benefit to Dedicated Hosts, reducing overall hosting costs.
• Portal-based setup: Dedicated Hosts can be provisioned directly through the Azure portal without requiring additional tooling.
• Compliance-oriented design: The single-tenant model helps satisfy isolation requirements common in healthcare, finance, and government workloads.

Alongside the Dedicated Host announcement, the Azure Global team published new blueprint samples that include control mappings aligned to NIST SP 800-53 Revision 4. These blueprints cover policy areas such as account management, separation of duties, remote access controls, audit and review procedures, and denial-of-service protection — giving teams a head start on automating compliance enforcement within their Azure environments.

New Relic Adds Azure Database Integrations

The New Relic monitoring platform expanded its Azure integrations to cover three managed database services:

• Azure Database for MySQL
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• Azure Database for MariaDB

These integrations allow operators to consolidate telemetry from databases, containers, and servers into a single observability view. Within the New Relic One dashboard, teams can monitor all three database engines side by side, write custom NRQL queries against the collected data, and configure alert conditions based on performance thresholds. The additions reduce the operational overhead of switching between separate monitoring tools for different database engines running in Azure.

Azure Databricks Pre-Purchase Plan and Regional Expansion

Azure Databricks — already integrated with Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Machine Learning — introduced a pre-purchase pricing model effective August 6, 2019. Under this model:

• Customers commit to a one- to three-year term and receive up to a 37 percent discount compared to pay-as-you-go rates.
• Rather than paying for reserved capacity on an hourly basis, customers receive a pool of pre-purchased Databricks Units (DBUs) that can be consumed at any time during the commitment period, providing greater scheduling flexibility for batch and streaming workloads.

Simultaneously, Azure Databricks expanded its regional footprint to 26 regions with the addition of South Africa and South Korea, broadening availability for teams operating in those geographies.

New Developer Tools in Azure Cloud Shell

Azure Compute program manager Alfred Sin announced several additions to Azure Cloud Shell, the browser-based command-line environment that gives developers immediate access to Azure tooling without local installation. The new tools added in this update included:

• Puppet Bolt: An open-source, agentless task runner for automating ad-hoc workflows and orchestration tasks across nodes.
• HashiCorp Packer: A tool for automating the creation of machine images across multiple platforms from a single configuration source.
• Azure Functions Core Tools CLI: Enables local-style debugging of Azure Functions directly from Cloud Shell.

Incremental updates were also shipped to Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, and the Java Development Kit (JDK) bundled within Cloud Shell.

Pacemaker Support and RHEL High Availability in Azure Marketplace

Alfred Sin also highlighted the availability of Pacemaker, the open-source cluster resource manager, for managing high-availability compute clusters on Azure. For Linux workloads specifically, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Pay-As-You-Go images with the High Availability Add-On became available in Azure Marketplace, providing a flexible consumption model for HA-enabled RHEL deployments. A similar marketplace offering was announced for RHEL images pre-configured with SAP packages, addressing the needs of enterprise SAP on Azure deployments.

Summary

The first full week of August 2019 brought a broad set of Azure updates spanning government contracting, compliance infrastructure, observability integrations, analytics pricing, and developer tooling. The JEDI contract pause was the highest-profile news, but the Dedicated Host announcement and NIST blueprint samples were arguably more immediately actionable for enterprise DevOps and compliance teams building regulated workloads on Azure.