Government regulation on cloud security may spur SaaS use in health care

"It's a threat to all industries, not just health care," said Davis. "SecuritySecurity should be transparent and operate in the background." Alles zu Security auf CIO.de

Most of the cloud products are so new there aren't government regulations for specific use cases, said Charles Beyrouthy, CEO of LabCloud, a Boston company that develops SaaSSaaS (software as service) products for small and medium-size research laboratories. The government could help by developing standards for different data uses, such as in a laboratory or for data related to ehealth. Alles zu SaaS auf CIO.de

The same method of financial penalties and rewards that compelled hospitals to adopt electronic health records for meaningful use in patient care could be used to get cloud vendors onboard with sharing security data, said Davis.

"The role of government is to move toward that transparency and data sharing," he said.

Governments could also pass legislation that gives people more access to the data companies have collected on them and the ability to control it, such as correcting wrong information, said Ralph Zottola, CTO of the research computing division at the University of Massachusetts.