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Executive Interview Live at HIMSS 26’: Zero Breach Cloud Security with Gerry Miller

Speaker: [00:00:00] Most health systems are running cloud, like it's just someone else's data center. Cloud ity helps you turn cloud into a strategic advantage with deep healthcare experience across high trust and HIPAA and even FedRAMP. So instead of constant firefighting, you've got visibility into your security posture and confidence.

In your environment and cloud spend, you can actually explain to the board cloud that works as hard as your mission. That's cloud ity. Find out more@cloudity.com.

Speaker 7: I'm Drex Deford, president of Cyber and Risk here at this week, health and the 2 29 Project. Our mission is Healthcare Transformation powered by community. Welcome to this executive interview on the UnHack Channel. Real conversations about managing risk at the highest levels.

Let's dive in.

Drex DeFord: Hey everyone. We're at Hims 2026. Huge crowd. , I actually talked to Hal Wolf [00:01:00] this morning, the CEO of hims, 25,000 people, he said. So a nice big group here., You guys have your booth. Uh, hi. I'm glad you're here, Jerry.

Gerry Miller: Yeah, thank you. I'm

Drex DeFord: glad I'm here as well. Jerry from Ity, you have your booth downstairs.

There's a lot of cool stuff going on down there. You said you had a lot of traffic. How, how's it going? Tell me about you, tell me about the company and the work you're doing. Sure,

Gerry Miller: yeah. So, I'm Jerry Miller, I'm the founder and CEO of Cloud City. Uh, I've spent. Most of my life in technology in the past 15 years has been in healthcare technology.

Uh, we started cloud toity 15 years ago to focus on helping healthcare organizations successfully leverage cloud technology. Uh, we started primarily with AWS and today that's expanded across Microsoft Azure, uh, as well as through Google Cloud. Uh, our primary line of business is. Helping healthcare organizations through managed services, managed security and managed compliance.

Drex DeFord: Mm.

Gerry Miller: Uh, building highly secure workloads on public cloud. We manage somewhere north of a hundred million people's PHI. [00:02:00] Wow. Across many dozens of customers and thousands of cloud accounts.

Drex DeFord: Do you see folks moving in their, for your customer base, moving their EHR to the cloud, moving their imaging stuff to the cloud, what, what's the, where do you focus mostly?

Gerry Miller: Uh, we are seeing, um, a, an accelerating adoption of cloud-based EHR systems, um, and a lot of on-prem migrations. Uh, most of the bigger EHR vendors of course, sell their own cloud-based offering. Uh, but we're even seeing migrations out of those data centers into, uh, primarily AWS and Azure. Um, and of course with a large EHR migration comes all of the, we call them COT travelers.

Sure. The pact, VNA systems. Yeah. The document management, fax management, labs management. Um, so we're seeing an accelerating adoption, uh, as the public clouds get more mature, the early adopters have gotten through their migrations, they've gone well.

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Gerry Miller: Um, and we're seeing, uh, a. A fairly [00:03:00] substantial increase in, uh, security and compliance and availability, uh, while reducing costs.

Drex DeFord: Do you, do you see folks do multi-cloud solutions? Because it seems like all the clouds in the last six months have had some kind of an oops ammonia.

Gerry Miller: Yeah, they, they've all had oops moments. But that happens in data centers too.

Drex DeFord: Oh, absolutely.

Gerry Miller: So we are seeing multi-cloud adoption. It's less around mistrust of the uptime of the major cloud provider and more about beginning to pick and choose services, which may shine more particularly on any one cloud.

Oh,

Drex DeFord: okay.

Gerry Miller: So we have customers that are very focused on fire adoption, for example, that may have become enamored with Google's fire APIs and the BigQuery service. Um. And you know, some customers who are very large Microsoft shops might have an affinity toward, uh, Microsoft Azure, but there are certain compelling services, say on AWS [00:04:00] that might draw them in.

So we are seeing multi-vendor, multi-cloud adoption. Less out of a look for, you know, redundancy and uptime and much more to cherry pick the right services on the right platform.

Drex DeFord: Totally makes sense. Is that something you helped them with? Figure out like where's the right place to maybe moon this workload or

Gerry Miller: Very much so this

Drex DeFord: workload.

Gerry Miller: Yeah. At Cloud Ity, you know, we, our focus for 15 years has always been helping healthcare organizations adopt cloud effectively. Uh, what does effective mean? It means highly secure. It means highly available. It means highly optimized, cost optimized, um, right sized. The way that you work with cloud technologies tends to be different than the way that you would work in a data center because cloud is pay as you go.

And so, uh, all of the CapEx that goes with every three to five years buying all new servers. It goes away and you can scale up and scale down as you need.

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Gerry Miller: So [00:05:00] the way of working with cloud is very different. And so picking the right cloud partner or partners becomes very important. And Cloud Ity has a long history of helping with those choices.

Drex DeFord: The one of the things I think that I see always as a challenge in healthcare as we make investments, uh, the CapEx softex conversation, but a lot of times it comes down to. Um, I really need a partner to help me create the ROI

Gerry Miller: Yep.

Drex DeFord: Pitch that I'm gonna make inside the organization. Right. How do you help 'em with that, that piece of work?

Gerry Miller: Well, we generally start with financial ROI, because that is generally where cloud adoption starts. It often begins at a typical inflection point in the CFO's office. Either a co-location, facilities lease is up for a renewal.

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Gerry Miller: Or equipment is going off service or needs to be refreshed.

It's

Drex DeFord: time for that $20 [00:06:00] million.

Right. Every five years cycle.

Gerry Miller: Exactly.

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Gerry Miller: Yeah. So those are great inflection points during which we can open that cloud conversation. Um, and so we, we look for those, uh, a lot of organizations that may be mid-cycle though. We'll start up a new project. They want to experiment with AI or some genomics research, and so they'll put just that workload in a new cloud account.

Yeah, makes sense. So we see a lot of different paradigms for effective cloud adoption. Um, and it, it generally begins with financial ROI, but we quickly move to additional ROI. So if you can move faster, if you can release. Products quicker. If you can treat patients more efficiently, if you can increase or utilization or in pandemic times, if you can get a COVID registry up and running like we did for the state of New York in six days, that ROI is measured in how many thousands of people didn't [00:07:00] die.

Drex DeFord: Yeah.

Gerry Miller: And so we tend to expand the definition of ROI. Over the course of a lifetime of cloud adoption.

Drex DeFord: I mean it That makes total sense to you because agility, that ability to sort of change direction and do new things on the timeline that executives in your board often want you to do it

Gerry Miller: right.

Drex DeFord: You don't wanna say, well, and we Yep, we'll do that, but it's gonna take us a year to build the infrastructure to be ready to go.

Gerry Miller: Exactly.

Drex DeFord: You kind of take that outta the mix. The other part of it, of course, I would be remiss if I didn't ask about cybersecurity. Yeah. Tell me about the security and the, the work that you do, uh, helping health systems through that piece of work when they go to the cloud.

Gerry Miller: Absolutely. So I mentioned that we have north of a hundred million people's PHI under our stewardship,

Drex DeFord: right?

Gerry Miller: No system that we manage has ever experienced a reach in 15 years of existence. Uh, we obviously take security very seriously. We've got. Uh, quite a fulsome, BAA, that we'll sign. We [00:08:00] come backed by tens of millions of dollars of cyber insurance, uh, underwritten by Lloyd's of London. Um, and so that's very important to our reputation, our customer's reputation, and ultimately for the patients that they serve.

Because this is some of the most sensitive data, but the federal government has trusted us with managing all the health records for the va. Um, some of the largest health systems in the world trust us to manage their records. Um, so security comes first and foremost for us. We have been high trust R two certified for nine years now.

That's

Drex DeFord: good.

Gerry Miller: We have more inheritable controls than any other company out there. Uh, we actually built, uh, the cybersecurity AI rule set for hitrust, uh, on their working group. So we're continuing to evolve and advance the cause of security as it relates to healthcare data. Uh, that is always front and center of everything that Cloud toity does at all times.

Drex DeFord: Uh, last question. [00:09:00] You look out the next couple of years, what, what do you see happening in healthcare? What do you think that means for you and the work that's going on in the cloud? Uh, put under your soothsayer hat and kind of see what's going on in the future.

Gerry Miller: So we would be here until tomorrow if I answer that question fully.

Some, some of the, uh, emerging trends that we're seeing are really around data and what you can do with data. It used to be that healthcare organizations were very application centric. You had your EHR, you had your Pax VNA. Now what we think about is taking all of these very large but disparate data sets that health organizations tend to accumulate and thinking about how to connect the dots between these disparate systems, clinical data, genomic data, behavioral health data, SDOH, demographics.

And extracting value from that, which coincides [00:10:00] very nicely with the emergence of some exceptionally, uh, sophisticated AI models,

Drex DeFord: right?

Gerry Miller: And so the ability to combine data sets in a rational way, manage some of the requirements around data provenance and data tagging, uh, which manages the security aspect, and then being able to extract value from those disparate data sets.

Through modern AI technologies is really where we see the greatest advances in the coming few years.

Drex DeFord: You're gonna play in that space, working in that space. We play heavily

Gerry Miller: in

Drex DeFord: that

Gerry Miller: space.

Drex DeFord: Yes. That's amazing.

Gerry Miller: Yeah.

Drex DeFord: Uh, and it's funny how, um, everything's connected to everything else. The classifications that you do

Gerry Miller: Yes.

Drex DeFord: For cybersecurity of data is reusable. For things like this and

Gerry Miller: Right.

Drex DeFord: Public data sets that are reusable.

Gerry Miller: Yep.

Drex DeFord: And situations like this. Hey, thanks for coming in. It's been my pleasure. I really appreciate you being on tonight.

Gerry Miller: Thank you for having me

all.

Thanks for joining this executive interview on UnHack with me Drex Deford here this [00:11:00] week. Health, we believe every healthcare leader needs a community to lean on and learn from. Build your network at this week, health.com/subscribe and share this with a colleague because together we're stronger.