In the nearly two years since the Cerner acquisition, Oracle has invested tens of thousands of engineering hours and millions of dollars to enhance its core clinical applications and improve cybersecurity for its customers in the healthcare industry. As part of this investment, Oracle has helped more than 1,000 Oracle Health EHR customers dramatically strengthen their defenses against cybercrime by supporting their migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Customers that migrated to OCI also reported performance gains of 20 to 60%. Today, Oracle is expanding its commitment to create a safer and more secure healthcare ecosystem by launching the Autonomous Shield initiative to simplify and accelerate Oracle Health EHR migrations to OCI at no additional cost.
Cloud computing delivers consistent innovation, so customers have the latest product features and the most up-to-date security capabilities. OCI automatically applies fixes to address a constantly changing cyber-terror landscape. This enables healthcare organizations to rely on Oracle’s real-time threat detection and monitoring, autonomous systems, and team of experts to help keep their networks safe. In turn, healthcare organizations can focus on what they do best—making people healthier. The constant innovation made possible with cloud computing, also enables customers to benefit from breakthrough AI technologies that can make their jobs easier and enhance patient experiences, such as the Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant.
“Recent events in healthcare have exploited vulnerabilities facing health systems around the world. Now more than ever, it’s important for health systems to choose companies like Oracle that make security simple—easy to use, deploy, and operate,” said Kemal Erkan, chief executive officer and president, United Medical. “Our transition to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been seamless and gives us more confidence in the performance and security of our technology.”
According to a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the healthcare industry has seen a 239% increase in large breaches involving hacking and a 278% increase in ransomware reported in the past four years. Even in the face of this growing threat, healthcare providers only spend about 8% of their IT budgets on security, well below the cross-industry average.
“Cyberattacks represent an imminent and existential threat to healthcare worldwide,” said Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences. “Our top priority is helping to keep our customers and their patients safe from the debilitating impacts of cyber-terrorism. With our clinical applications running on OCI, we provide our customers—big and small—with the same military-grade security that is used to protect the most sensitive data at some of the largest and most sophisticated businesses, national defense agencies, and governments around the world.”
The Oracle Autonomous Shield initiative simplifies Oracle Health EHR customer migrations to OCI with a clear and proven methodology that includes:
- Built-in security best practices
- Solution architecture development
- Application migration
- Access to a team of experts
- Go-live support
Building on Oracle’s legacy of protecting the world’s most important data
OCI can better equip customers to prevent, detect, and respond to security concerns because it is:
- Automated and effective: Oracle is the only healthcare technology provider that uses autonomous databases and operating systems to automatically patch and protect against the latest vulnerabilities. This helps eliminate cybersecurity’s biggest weakness—human error and delay.
- Secure from the ground up: Starting from the physical infrastructure, OCI isolates itself and customers from one another to reduce avenues of attack. Oracle is unique in offering not only choice in cloud location, but also a staffing and governance model to address compliance requirements.
- Secure by default: OCI provides always-on data encryption and on-by-default multi-factor authentication, activity auditing, and DDoS protection, so patient data, business transactions, and sensitive information can be protected. Our data encryption solutions incorporate industry-leading 256-bit AES encryption for data at rest and in transit.
- Built to deliver more control and greater protection: Oracle makes it easier for healthcare organizations to control access to their systems, enforcing least privilege access by default. OCI also helps customers pinpoint potential vulnerabilities and makes timely remediation recommendations to help ensure that essential healthcare systems stay up and running.
“The Oracle Autonomous Database completely automates provisioning, management, tuning, and upgrade processes of database instances without any downtime,” said Alexei Balaganski, lead analyst, KuppingerCole Analysts. “For healthcare organizations this substantially increases security and compliance of sensitive data and makes a compelling argument for moving this data to the Oracle Cloud.”
Protecting patients and the health networks from cybercrime
The recent attack on Change Healthcare was a wake-up call that more needs to be done to protect the industry from increasingly savvy cybercriminals. Although Oracle systems were not involved, Oracle security experts were able to support companies impacted by the attack.
Oracle diverted the traffic of several large health networks that used Change Healthcare as a payment gateway to other gateways in a matter of days. Since Oracle rerouted their traffic, these networks have avoided payment disruptions on more than $3 billion in claims
