Back 
Healthcare organizations still seem to think that blocking all access to unapproved cloud storage or cloud collaboration tools means that they’re preventing leakage of sensitive information. But as the old saying goes, “Data flows like water.” Eventually, it’s going to find the holes and escape.
Even if a healthcare IT system has water-tight data controls, that’s not the only goal within the organization—and not even the most important one. When blocking prevents a clinician from doing their job to the best of their abilities, data is especially hard to contain.
The need for more, and better, collaboration in healthcare
Today, a lot of health organizations are working to become more collaborative across doctors and teams to improve the quality of care and improve outcomes for patients. If I were a patient undergoing treatment, I would want to make sure that my primary care physician, my specialists, and all the different services and facilities involved across the medical treatment ecosystem would have access to all the necessary information to help resolve my illness. In fact, that’s one of the main transformative benefits that digital tools have brought to medicine in recent years.
Patients expect that all the different care providers they need are working together to solve their health problems. But the whole idea of blocking data sharing as a default institutional policy limits the ability for healthcare providers to operate as a nimble, coordinated unit. In order to collaborate, sensitive patient data needs to be shared—across departments and oftentimes outside the institution. And this kind of sharing has historically been a problem for healthcare security. Security teams tend to block first and ask questions later.
Managing data risks shouldn’t be all or nothing
Why would we want to prevent sharing of patient information among the people who need to use it? Blocking collaboration tools or access to data sources outside the organization’s control might limit the risk of data loss, but it also sets us back in the core objective of treating patients with the best available resources.
Here’s a good example. Let’s say the only managed cloud application for collaboration at our hospital is Microsoft OneDrive. The hospital’s security team blocks access to all other services (e.g., Dropbox, Google Drive, Box) to ensure that private patient data/PII can’t be exfiltrated via those tools. But what if a doctor is collaborating with a major research university on a specialized course of treatment, and that institution only allows access via Dropbox?
So, now we have a problem. Rigid data blocking policies are hampering cross-institutional collaboration and the best treatment for a patient, whether the data in question contains sensitive information or not. Maybe it’s just communications back and forth between the hospital and the university. Shouldn’t they be automatically allowed to collaborate across different cloud platforms under benign circumstances, rather than wasting time for one side or the other to request and wait for an approved exception from IT/security?
In this case, the hospital says that clinicians can’t g