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The challenges of 5G in healthcare

The health sector is undergoing a rapid transformation, moving from local hospital care to a distributed, patient-focused approach. Several technological developments have encouraged this rapid revolution in the healthcare vertical and 5G is one of them.

Today, 4G technology and other communication standards are used in the healthcare sector for intelligent healthcare services and applications.

With the growth of the health sector, various applications are expected to produce a large amount of data in different formats and sizes.

This huge and diverse data needs special treatment in terms of end-to-end delay, bandwidth, latency and other attributes.

In practice, it is difficult for current communication technologies to meet the requirements of the highly dynamic and time-sensitive healthcare applications of the future.

Therefore, 5G networks are being designed and developed to meet the diverse communication needs of healthcare applications in the Internet of Things (IoT).

5G-assisted smart healthcare networks are a foundation for IoT devices that require enhanced network performance and improved cell coverage. Current connectivity solutions for the healthcare sector face challenges such as support for a large number of devices, standardization, energy efficiency, device density and security.

5G in a nutshell

5G is the 5th generation standard for broadband cellular networks. It offers high-speed transmission of large volumes of data and low latency. What’s more, unlike other standards, 5G can integrate a much larger number of user devices.

Benefits:

  • Improved mobile broadband;
  • Fast communication between machines;
  • Energy savings of up to 90%, longer battery life;
  • Ultra-reliable, low-latency communication.

Although other network technologies offer some of these features, none offer all of them to the same degree as 5G.

5G added value in healthcare

5G meets the demanding requirements of healthcare in terms of capacity, bandwidth, reliability, availability, latency and security.

The evolution to 5G comes at an opportune time for healthcare organizations, as they make telemedicine and remote care a key element of their data-driven business strategies. This allows them to use resources more efficiently, reduce costs and improve quality and the customer experience.

At the same time, big data and cognitive technologies are also playing an expanding role in modern medicine. Artificial intelligence (AI) supports clinical decision-making. Machine learning helps radiologists identify tumors that would otherwise be invisible.

The examples are growing every day, as are the large amounts of data they leverage, with a demand for near-zero latency to support real-time use cases.

Therefore, 5G technology presents itself for different use cases, such as telemonitoring, mass connectivity of sensors and devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless application in augmented and virtual reality, real-time data transfer with emergency services, robotic-guided telesurgery, live transmissions of surgeries, telediagnostics, localization of devices and building infrastructure, organ transport of medicines, etc.

In short, the speed and latency of 5G networks offer truly transformational opportunities for healthcare, but also bring new operational requirements around automation, vulnerability management, cost and capacity management.

The challenges of 5G in healthcare

The advent of 5G opens up a wide range of applications, data and infrastructure for healthcare organizations to unlock competitive advantage. But this new era is also related to major challenges that will involve increasing the speed, complexity and scale of data flows and business processes.

Workflow orchestration capabilities will play a key role in enabling healthcare organizations to adopt these new technologies while maximizing the value of the infrastructure, including:

  • Formalize and automate the main business processes and workflows;
  • Automate, monitor and manage workflows on computing and software platforms in hybrid, on-premises and cloud architectures;
  • Use of predictive analysis to detect delays or potential failures before they happen and automatically trigger correction;
  • Automate, orchestrate, monitor and troubleshoot data exchanges;
  • Connecting departments and facilitating work between silos for greater speed and simplicity.

Security challenges: vulnerability management

As healthcare infrastructure becomes more complex, IoT devices proliferate and integration increases into third-party applications, the mindset of healthcare organizations towards vulnerability management must evolve to become more proactive and preventative.

At this level of complexity, manual efforts will fall far short of protecting data and systems, a critical priority given the risks posed by rampant ransomware attacks targeting the healthcare sector. Meanwhile, compliance with regulations such as HIPPA, LGPD and PCI DSS also remains essential.

To meet these challenges, healthcare organizations are adopting SecOps strategies in which automated intelligence helps analyze, prioritize and remediate risks based on their impact on the business.

Automated cloud remediation and compliance allow providers to detect and eliminate security gaps and avoid regulatory lapses in ever-changing cloud environments and applications.

Cost and capacity management challenges

As healthcare organizations take advantage of 5G data sharing, they will look to a hybrid of cloud and on-premise solutions to manage their volume and meet peak capacity requirements.

The fast and frictionless scalability offered by the cloud makes it possible to accommodate the large amounts of data involved in modern healthcare, while the use of computing and storage resources as a service allows healthcare organizations to adapt quickly and cost-effectively to changing needs.

At the same time, the growing use of the cloud can also increase management complexity, as well as the risk of security breaches and a growing regulatory burden.

To take full advantage of the agility and elasticity of the cloud, healthcare organizations need to be able to migrate data to and between environments easily and securely, optimize the placement of cloud-based workloads for performance and cost, ensure business continuity, maintain data privacy, and guarantee the integrity of clinical information.

Automated infrastructure management can speed up migration to the cloud, while simplifying ongoing operations processes.

The CipherTrust Data Security Platform solution allows healthcare institutions to protect their structure as they advance in the use of 5G technology

According to IDC, more than 175 zetabytes of data will be created by 2025, and today more than half of all corporate data is stored in the cloud.

To handle the complexity of where data is stored, CipherTrust Data Security Platform provides strong capabilities to protect and control access to sensitive data in databases, files, and containers. Specific technologies include:

CipherTrust Transparent Encryption

Encrypts data in on-premises, cloud, database, file, and Big Data environments with comprehensive access controls and detailed data access audit logging that can prevent the most malicious attacks.

CipherTrust Database Protection

It provides transparent column-level encryption of structured and confidential data that resides in databases such as credit card, social security numbers, national identification numbers, passwords, and e-mail addresses.

CipherTrust Application Data Protection

It offers APIs for developers to quickly add encryption and other cryptographic functions to their applications, while SecOps controls the encryption keys.

CipherTrust Tokenization

It offers application-level data tokenization services in two convenient solutions that provide customer flexibility – Token without Vault with dynamic policy-based data masking and Tokenization in Vault.

CipherTrust Batch Data Transformation

Provides static data masking services to remove sensitive information from production databases so that compliance and security issues are alleviated when sharing a database with a third party for analysis, testing, or other processing.

CipherTrust Manager

It centralizes keys, management policies, and data access for all CipherTrust Data Security Platform products and is available in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 compliant physical and virtual formats.

CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager

It offers its own key lifecycle management (BYOK) for many cloud infrastructure, platform, and software-as-a-service providers.

CipherTrust KMIP Server

It centralizes key management for the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) commonly used in storage solutions.

CipherTrust TDE Key Manager

Centralizes key management for encryption found in Oracle, SQL and Always Encrypted SQL.

The portfolio of data protection products that make up the CipherTrust Data Security Platform solution enables healthcare organizations to protect data at rest and in motion across the entire IT ecosystem and ensures that the keys to this information are always protected and only under your control.

It simplifies data security, improves operational efficiency, and accelerates compliance time. Regardless of where your data resides.

The CipherTrust platform ensures that your data is secure, with a wide range of proven, industry-leading products and solutions for deployment in data centers, either those managed by cloud service providers (CSPs) or managed service providers (MSPs), or as a cloud-based service managed by Thales, a leading security company.

Tool portfolio that ensures data protection

With data protection products from the CipherTrust Data Security Platform, your healthcare organization can:

Strengthen security and compliance

CipherTrust data protection products and solutions address the demands of a range of security and privacy requirements, including electronic identification, authentication and trust, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), General Data Protection Act (LGPD), and other compliance requirements.

Optimizes team and resource efficiency

CipherTrust Data Security Platform offers the broadest support for data security use cases in the industry, with products designed to work together, a single line for global support, a proven track record of protecting against evolving threats, and the industry’s largest ecosystem of data security partnerships.

With a focus on ease of use, APIs for automation, and responsive management, the CipherTrust Data Security Platform solution ensures that your teams can quickly deploy, secure, and monitor the protection of your business.

In addition, professional services and partners are available for design, implementation, and training assistance to ensure fast and reliable implementations with minimal staff time.

Reduces total cost of ownership

CipherTrust Data Security Platform’s data protection portfolio offers a broad set of data security products and solutions that can be easily scaled, expanded for new use cases, and have a proven track record of protecting new and traditional technologies.

With CipherTrust Data Security Platform, healthcare institutions can prepare their investments for the future while reducing operational costs and capital expenditures.

About Eval

With a track record of leadership and innovation dating back to 2004, Eval not only keeps up with technological trends, but we are also in an incessant quest to bring news by offering solutions and services that make a difference to people’s lives.

With value recognized by the market, EVAL’s solutions and services meet the highest regulatory standards of public and private organizations, such as SBIS, ITI, PCI DSS, and LGPD. In practice, we promote information security and compliance, increase companies’ operational efficiency, and reduce costs.

Innovate now, lead always: get to know Eval’s solutions and services and take your company to the next level.

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