A Study on Migration and Cloud Security Enhancement Measures in Small and Medium-Sized General Hospitals
Small and medium-sized general hospitals in Korea continue to operate their medical information systems on legacy on-premises IT infrastructure. ...
A Study on Migration and Cloud Security Enhancement Measures in Small and Medium-Sized General Hospitals
Small and medium-sized general hospitals in Korea continue to operate their medical information systems on legacy on-premises IT infrastructure. The closed network separation model, once regarded as a security standard, has revealed fundamental limitations in the face of increasing cyber threat such as ransomware, Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), and insider data breaches. Recent incidents at Daejeon Eulji Hospital, Pusan National University Dong Hospital, and Ewha Womans University Seoul Hospital demonstrate that such threats extend beyond information protection issues to directly threaten the reliability and operational continuity of healthcare institutions.
Small and medium-sized hospitals face structural vulnerabilities including the absence of dedicated security personnel, outdated operating systems, and delayed adoption of security solutions due to budget constraints. While full-scale cloud migration is considered as an alternative, the high cost, resource requirements, and strict domestic regulatory environment pose significant barriers. In this context, a phased and selective hybrid transition model based on data sensitivity emerges as a realistic solution.
This study proposes a Data Tiering-based hybrid cloud model and a vulnerability assessment framework tailored for small and medium-sized general hospitals with fewer than 500 beds. The proposed model classifies medical data from Electronic Medical Record (EMR), Order Communication System (OCS), and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) based on sensitivity, access frequency, and legal retention period. Highly sensitive clinical data is retained in on-premises environments, while less sensitive data is strategically migrated to domestic Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) such as NCP and KT Cloud, in compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act and the Medical Service Act.
Furthermore, this study identifies security threats across migration phases and develops an integrated vulnerability assessment checklist covering five domains: system, network, cloud, data, and management. The checklist is designed based on international standards including the KISA guidelines, CSA Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) v4.0, and NIST SP 800-144, while reflecting the practical constraints of small and medium-sized hospitals.
The contributions of this study are threefold. First, it complements existing cloud migration research that has primarily focused on large hospitals by presenting a specialized model that reflects the resource limitations and regulatory environment of small and medium-sized institutions. Second, it advances the theoretical concept of data tiering into a practically applicable structure by directly linking it to the legal retention obligations of medical data. Third, it provides a practical guideline in the form of a checklist that field personnel can directly utilize, integrating security threats across both migration and operational phases.
Keywords: Medical Data Migration, Hybrid Cloud, Data Tiering, Vulnerability Assessment, Small and Medium-sized Hospitals, Healthcare Information Security