Knowledge Center

It was not until recently that health care organizations felt comfortable to migrate their applications to the cloud. Decision makers experienced fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the cloud’s ability to be secure and resilient running their applications in a shared environment. With recent security attacks, the cloud vendors have demonstrated operational services that were very expensive to replicate for on-prem data centers. In response, many organizations migrated applications to cloud vendors.

Despite the advancements of the cloud technologies, challenges remain. At Geisinger, Todd Eckard, Senior Director of Information Technology, oversees their challenges related to their cloud environment including detecting security vulnerabilities, providing software patches, planning disaster recovery and related backup plans, monitoring access control risks, and monitoring change management risks.

For our meeting, Todd discusses transitioning from the physical IT environment (on-prem) to the Cloud IT environment (hosted). Specifically, from a risk perspective, he will focus on several things that should be considered before the transition occurs (e.g., assurance that a control framework is in place for the cloud instance, review of any current risks and working through remediation before transition, application rationalization prior to reducing costs, and transitioning in waves to reduce risk. After his short presentation, we will open discussions to exchange challenges and successful practice with each other.