Experience has shown that many medical facilities might be good at medicine but terrible at managing computer data. Hackers have frequently succeeded in accessing patients’ confidential information in recent years. Now the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) has given hospitals and other medical facilities the go-ahead to store sensitive patient records in the cloud in order to both reduce expenses and to improve security.

Rob Shaw, deputy chief executive at NHS Digital, said: “It is for individual organisations to decide if they wish to use cloud and data offshoring but there are a huge range of benefits in doing so, such as greater data security protection and reduced running costs when implemented effectively.”

Details may be found in an article by Steve Ranger in the ZDNet web site at: http://zd.net/2ruQTyl.