Google Cloud Partners With Health-ISAC to Advance Healthcare Cybersecurity

Google Cloud is joining the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC) as an ambassador partner, the tech company announced in a blog post by Taylor Lehmann, director, office of the CISO at Google Cloud. Google Cloud is the first and only major cloud provider to join Health-ISAC.

In its role as an ambassador partner, Google Cloud will leverage its many resources and experts to work alongside industry leaders to defend and secure the healthcare sector. The partnership stemmed from Google’s August 2021 announcement that it would invest at least $10 billion over the next five years into advancing cybersecurity.

Also in 2021, Google launched the Google Cybersecurity Action Team (GCAT), which aims to align security resources and facilitate digital transformation efforts across a variety of industries. Google Cloud plans to utilize GCAT and its other resources to aid the healthcare sector in enhancing cybersecurity efforts.  

“Number one is to make sure that we are doing everything we can with the resources we have to protect the health industry,” Lehmann said about the partnership in an interview with HealthITSecurity.

“That requires us to know these folks, and that requires us to be there and understand what investments we need to make.”

Health-ISAC is a community of critical infrastructure owners and operators within healthcare and primarily focuses on security threat sharing and raising awareness about the latest vulnerabilities, indicators of compromise, and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Health-ISAC also hosts educational events and provides mitigation strategies and best practices to the sector.

“We’re thrilled to have Google Cloud as an Ambassador sponsor with Health-ISAC,” Errol Weiss, chief security officer at Health-ISAC, explained in Google’s blog post.

“This partnership will help with Health-ISAC’s expansion in Europe and Asia-Pacific, while also leveraging Google Cloud’s vast resources and data for the benefit of improving the security and resilience of the health and public health sector globally.”

Google Cloud’s partnership with Health-ISAC is a positive step toward collaboration between vendors, providers, and trusted industry groups across the sector. These collaborations are especially crucial as the healthcare sector continues to be hit hard by cyberattacks and data breaches.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) data breach portal showed that there have been 337 healthcare data breaches (impacting more than 500 individuals each) in the first half of this year alone. A report from Fortified Health Security noted that nearly 80 percent of those incidents were attributed to malicious hacking activity.

“We are really trying to find the ways to provide systemic balance using Google and its resources.” Lehmann continued.

“At the end of the day, if we can help hospitals stay up and running free of ransomware, if we can help pharmaceutical and medtech companies produce lifesaving therapies faster, and if we can help organizations stay in business, despite this environment, we will call that a success.”