FEATURE: CYBERSECURITY clouds, while still leaning on public cloud services for less sensitive workloads. They get the best of both worlds this way – flexibility and scalability without giving up sovereignty or control.
What healthcare leaders should be asking
If you’ re responsible for data strategy at a hospital, clinic or health authority, there are questions worth losing sleep over and worth asking your cloud or IaaS provider today:
• Is our patient data stored in Canada, and not just‘ accessible’ here?
• Who owns the infrastructure that houses it?
• Could foreign laws override Canadian privacy protections?
• What guarantees are in place if the provider faces legal issues or political pressure?
• If the answers feel vague or evasive, clearly that’ s a red flag.
These are the answers you are looking for:
• Yes. Your data is stored and processed entirely within Canadian borders, in facilities that meet or exceed healthcare compliance standards.
• Yes. The infrastructure is operated by a provider with a Canadian legal presence, so your data isn’ t vulnerable to foreign government access.
• Yes. The provider adheres to recognized security and privacy standards, i. e. ISO 27001 and SOC 2, with transparency around who can access your data and what happens if something goes wrong.
• Yes. There’ s a built-in commitment to resilience. This includes redundancy, failover protections and service continuity plans, ensuring Canadian healthcare data stays safe even in times of global turbulence.
In other words, don’ t settle for‘ trust us’. Insist on transparency, specifics and, most of all, proof.
be protected as carefully as the healthcare providers are protecting their health – really, their lives.
Losing control of that data, whether through foreign access, an outage or a legal dispute, isn’ t just a technical failure. It’ s a betrayal of that trust.
And make no mistake: patients are paying attention. Legal consequences are not the only result of a breach. Personal and organizational reputations face irreparable damage, and the wider fallout can be painful as well. It can make people hesitate before sharing information with their doctors, and that hesitation could have very real consequences for patient outcomes.
It’ s tempting to think this is only a big-hospital problem, but smaller clinics and community health providers are just as vulnerable – sometimes more so. Many rely heavily on third-party providers, which can increase risk if not carefully vetted. For them, choosing the right partner isn’ t just an IT decision. It’ s a survival strategy.
Real-world lessons
Roger Brulotte, CEO, Leaseweb Canada
Why this isn’ t just about rules and regulations
We don’ t have to look far to see how bad it can get when healthcare data sovereignty isn’ t prioritised.
Yes, compliance matters. Healthcare organizations are rightly cautious about staying on the right side of PIPEDA and provincial health privacy laws.
But this goes deeper than rules. At its heart, this is all about trust.
Patients extend trust to their providers when they hand over their most personal information. They’ re not just signing a consent form. They expect that information to
When one of Canada’ s largest medical testing companies – LifeLabs – was hit by a massive data breach, it wasn’ t just another story about hackers. This one was deeply personal and it shook millions of Canadians. The personal and health information of roughly 15 million people was exposed by the breach – most of them from Ontario and British Columbia. Names, addresses, health card numbers, login details, even lab results were now in the hands of cybercriminals.
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