Recently it was revealed that Oregon Health & Science University (OSHU) staff were storing patient data in a cloud storage solution – namely, Google Drive. What’s the big deal? It’s Google, it has to be secure right? Sure, but the fact remains that there are regulations that need to be followed when it comes to handling patient information.

While Google is a well-known, reputable technology company, it typically isn’t an approved supplier of storage for things such as health care records. Regardless of the company, and whether they encrypt their servers, there’s no guarantee your data is secure in the event of someone successfully hacking into their systems.

The best way to ensure cloud security is to treat it like you’d treat a secure network storage folder – encrypt it. Cloud storage options like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, SugarSync and others, while secure in their own right, are only as secure as their overall servers. If someone gains access to the server, all data on that server is exposed unless it’s been encrypted somewhere else – like your local PC.

Encryption of data located in cloud storage services should never be left up to the service provider – organizations need to take that into their own hands and do the encryption at the endpoint before that data can be moved to an outside provider. It’s the only way to maintain the security of the information.

It’s something we’re investigating thoroughly into right now. How do we effectively manage the encryption keys for users of cloud storage and enable them to properly and securely store and share data in the cloud?

Without getting into greater detail, we’re close to delivering our solution for cloud services encryption. Rest assured, it doesn’t depend on the security of the provider but will leverage our extensive expertise in key management and work within the enterprise for organization to not only store, but share data securely through cloud storage solutions.