Taking a Simple Approach to Cloud Security
Whether you’re building or buying in the cloud, the benefits are fundamentally the same: You don’t have to purchase as many dedicated resources and you get near limitless scalability.
However, when you’re building an app in the cloud, or “lifting and shifting,” you’re at greater risk of mirroring your existing problems or security issues in the cloud and adding new concerns.
SaaS, on the other hand, is more convenient because the bulk of your risk revolves around how users access these applications on endpoints. You lose some control over the application layer, but another way of looking at it is that you have one less thing to worry about, provided you’re shopping for SaaS solutions that are compliant with healthcare industry regulations.
In both cases, you still must manage secure access to the application to prevent misuse, data loss and any sort of credential harvesting. Nothing does this more simply, affordably and effectively as a security service edge.
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Why SSE and Cloud Need to Be Coupled
An SSE governs security policy and application access and usability for cloud environments. It helps you determine what users are allowed to do, when they’re allowed to do it and how they’re allowed to do it.
At a basic level, an SSE provides a secure web gateway to govern what apps are accessible, which can help avoid shadow IT, especially in hybrid and remote environments. It also provides a web application firewall to monitor and filter HTTP traffic. Application programming interface security and web encryption also come standard with SSEs. In most cases, SSEs scrutinize HTTP traffic much more granularly than a web administrator would have time for. It’s far easier to build in and execute predefined rules with SSE.
Another benefit of SSEs is that they rely on zero-trust network architecture. Unlike VPNs, which enable access to an entire network, ZTNA grants access to the specific application requested. Couple this with strong identity and access management and you end up with a highly secure cloud environment.
You can even use an SSE to run queries against your AI engine to make sure it’s not revealing vulnerable patient information or trade secrets.
There are obviously ways to secure SaaS and cloud-native apps without an SSE. But the benefit of an SSE is its simplicity. It can do so much for healthcare organizations.
Whether you’re moving applications to the cloud or subscribing to SaaS apps, you should be combining those cloud-native applications with an SSE. There are dozens of reputable brands offering mature solutions, including Prisma from Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler’s SSE, to name two. Secure Access from Cisco even has an integrated artificial intelligence assistant that can translate conversational prompts into security controls.
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