Stanford Hospital CISO Michael Mucha in Information Security Magazine — 7 Security Questions to Ask Your SaaS Provider

Qualys, Inc.

Last updated on: September 6, 2020

“The biggest thing we focus on with all of this is control of the data,” says Michael Mucha, chief information security officer for Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., which uses several clinical applications that are delivered as a service, including transcription, and radiology and analysis systems. Given that health care is by far the most regulated industry he has worked in, Mucha has created a standardized checklist for his technical assessment of any application delivered via the SaaS model. Among the most critical of those items include whether or not the service provider complies with SAS 112 audit requirements (which applies to nonprofits), how it documents its procedures for handling a security breach, and how it handles requests for changes and customized features, Mucha says.

Even more important will be the simple policies that a SaaS provider uses among its staff to protect your data. “We have complete access to the data, and we are the only ones with control of the authentication,” Mucha says. “The point is that you need a consistent approach to all these situations.”

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