The shift to cloud computing has exposed a series of worrisome dichotomies in healthcare, an industry that handles sensitive data and thus has unique privacy requirements. Consider the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, which supports a largely mobile workforce of more than 14,000 healthcare providers. The cloud allowed the organization to make decisions on technology for business services without having to get the IT department fully involved, according to chief information security officer Larry Whiteside Jr. But that also meant different areas of the enterprise chose different cloud hosts. Similarly, cloud technology helped mobilize data for thousands of field workers, but having to log into multiple systems was a chore.
