What is Cloud Visibility?

Aligning the trinity of goals: Cloud Visibility, Cost Optimization and Security Implications.

Many companies dive into cloud adoption, often believing their use case is unique and highly specialized after engaging with various stakeholders. In reality, the security foundation is often consistent across the board and across different industries. What sets a company apart is its ability to align with a potential client’s mission and demonstrate how it can help them achieve their unique goals.

Over the last eight years, I’ve worked with companies to transform and accelerate their workloads into the public cloud. Over time, these customers grew concerned about the cost of operating in the cloud, as they still had to maintain and secure it after migrating from on-premises. Moreover, security and permission management for developers are often treated as secondary considerations, rather than primary objectives during the cloud migration process. This oversight has led to unchecked cloud spending, while security measures become cumbersome and restrictive, creating significant challenges for healthcare IT teams.

Increase Healthcare Cloud Visibility

Solving for cloud visibility doesn’t have to be difficult. Preparing future workloads with the right tools, monitoring, and alerts are critical steps in the beginning of your healthcare organization’s cloud journey.

Strategic Partnerships: If you are unsure about where to start, focus on finding the right partner or MSSP to support you. They will equip you with the best practices and essential tools for security, giving you confidence in your approach. With the right partner by your side, there’s no need to second-guess your decisions.

Cost Optimization: Optimizing cloud costs requires a company-wide effort and a fundamental shift in mindset. Rather than treating workloads as fixed, unchanging entities, it’s important to start viewing them as dynamic and adaptable, which can significantly enhance cost efficiency. But what does it mean for workloads to be dynamic?

• Regularly replace and upgrade virtual machines and compute resources to newer models. Operating dynamically saves costs and reduces risks by replacing older machines.
• Thoroughly test new technologies and regularly evaluate older ones. Replace outdated processes with advanced and efficient solutions using machine learning and generative AI tools.
• Operational planning is an ongoing process that occurs more frequently when approached dynamically.
• A flexible mindset helps you avoid committing to long-term capital investments, like servers that require years of use before retirement.

These examples highlight how optimization strategies can reduce costs while enhancing security.

Healthcare Cloud Security

Many treat security as a secondary priority or just a checkbox, since creating fast and secure solutions rarely feels convenient. Build and secure workloads simultaneously to ensure optimal security.

Here are the most common questions I receive from the market, along with answers:

Customer: When moving to the public cloud, how do I prepare to ensure that it’s secure and efficient? 

Begin to prepare and build a comprehensive plan. When considering moving to the cloud, you want to focus on a particular provider. Those providers will give you a Migration Readiness Assessment, to give you the ability to prepare and prioritize what applications you want to move to the cloud, and what will most effectively advance your business priorities.

When setting up your workloads, establish the environment carefully. Partnering with certified and experienced industry professionals can help streamline the process and accelerate your progress.

Customer: I have already begun testing in the cloud. Does it make sense for me to start over in a secure environment? 

It depends on whether you built your workload as infrastructure as code (IaC) or not. It’s useful to have everything written as IaC. Updating code and adding security enhancement is much easier.

Customer: I’ve only used Cloud Native tools to manage resources, why should I explore additional tools?

Cloud Native tools provided by cloud providers are useful, but third-party tools can provide very thoughtful and intentional reorganization of data. In addition, third-party tools build features that complement or enhance existing futures.

Customer: My workload is mostly on-premises, what is going to be the biggest difference when I’ve moved to the cloud? Which gaps need identifying?

The most significant change when transitioning to the cloud is the shift in controls and shared responsibilities, which move from your organization to the public cloud providers or their resellers.

This is a positive shift, as responsibilities like physical controls and hardware access now fall to the cloud provider. Key considerations for securing workloads include proper logging, meeting auditing requirements, implementing effective data retention policies, and ensuring timely patching.

Enhance Healthcare Cloud Visibility and Security

ClearDATA delivers healthcare security and compliance solutions with precision and expertise. We address the industry’s specific requirements and provide exceptional value to healthcare organizations.

Our Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services deliver proactive threat detection and swift incident response, keeping your environments and workloads secure around the clock. Paired with our Cloud Posture Management solution, you gain enhanced visibility into your cloud infrastructure, enabling you to pinpoint vulnerabilities, ensure compliance, and stay ahead of changing regulatory demands.

Additionally, our state-of-the-art Security Operations Center (SOC) acts as your 24/7 defense team, actively monitoring for risks and escalating threats before they become breaches. These solutions not only safeguard your organization but also free up your internal resources to focus on delivering exceptional patient care.

ClearDATA empowers secure and compliant healthcare operations, providing trusted solutions to protect your organization every step of the way.