What Healthcare
Organizations Need to Learn About SSH Key Management
All industries that regularly deal with sensitive and personal information face certain regulatory pressure that seeks to govern the use, storage, and processing of that information. Nowhere is this as clear and evident than in the healthcare industry. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the regulatory body that sets the rules and regulations for the health care industry.
As to be expected, healthcare ICT environments employ considerable volumes of servers, routers, switches, database and application servers, and other networked systems to warehouse their clients information. In nearly every case, these systems are maintained and administered with the SSH protocol which provides privileged access via secure administrative login, application tunneling, and secure file transfers.
SSH keys are responsible for the administrative connections for practically all servers, routers, firewalls, and other networked devices and it is paramount for the SSH keys to be managed and controlled properly. This is because in addition to the privileged users, such as system administrators and application developers, SSH is also widely used for automated processes such as backups, database updates, and automated systems management.
