Five Ways to Improve Your Security Posture in Healthcare

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Cybersecurity stays prime of thoughts for healthcare, as it’s the most focused trade, incurring the best common value of a breach ($9.2M), with the slowest incidence response time (287 days).1

As a healthcare group, we’ve confronted new challenges over the past twenty-four months. Whereas the pandemic has created many new hurdles for the healthcare sector, it additionally grew to become the catalyst for healthcare innovation and transformation and has accelerated change.

Examples of this alteration embody:

  • Hybrid and distant work are actually commonplace
  • Adoption of digital care and telehealth are widespread
  • Acceleration of IoT and distant affected person monitoring
  • Elevated digitization of healthcare
  • Heightened concentrate on digital affected person experiences

With change comes new safety necessities

Healthcare is evolving into a brand new period the place almost all the pieces is linked via digital applied sciences that enhance the way in which healthcare is delivered to sufferers. The way forward for healthcare is being pushed by digital transformation that evolves our supplier care supply fashions, with a heightened concentrate on open-standards interoperability. This ongoing digitization will proceed to raise and introduce new safety dangers because the menace panorama turns into extra advanced.

Well being programs and hospitals proceed to guage and implement new fashions for care supply past the hospital partitions, comparable to distant clinics, ambulatory surgical procedure facilities, and residential well being. The digital platforms connecting these areas could also be regional, nationwide, or worldwide. Whereas this connectivity creates nice alternatives for transformation, it additionally creates broader assault surfaces for financially motivated menace actors.

Healthcare has skilled an ever-increasing frequency and severity of cyber safety breaches. Cyberattacks in healthcare greater than doubled in 2020, with ransomware accounting for 28% of all assaults. It’s simple to see why the data-rich healthcare trade is a goal for unhealthy actors.2

Cybersecurity breaches for healthcare organizations and sufferers contain the theft of protected well being info (PHI), personally identifiable info (PII), ransomware assaults, and the potential to hack and management medical gadgets. Breaches can lead to longer affected person stays, delays in procedures, and diversions to different services.

Medical device security can also be a priority for healthcare suppliers as unhealthy actors take goal at weak unpatched programs and improperly configured gadgets. The variety of linked medical gadgets can symbolize as much as three-quarters (74%) of the gadgets on a healthcare supply group’s community.2

The proliferation of good and linked medical gadgets will solely proceed sooner or later. Between 2020 and 2028, the good medical gadgets market is projected to develop by 20.1% CAGR.3

To complicate the panorama additional, healthcare organizations should contemplate requirements and regulatory necessities comparable to these discovered with HIPAA, ISO, NIST, GDPR, and PCI DSS. To guard essential affected person information and medical programs, many healthcare IT leaders have not too long ago adopted the Zero Trust security framework to bolster cybersecurity defenses. Whereas it’s each a method and an architectural mannequin, organizations want to acknowledge that additionally it is a journey.

Cisco defines Zero Trust as a complete method to securing all entry throughout a company’s functions and surroundings, from any consumer, system, and placement. It protects the workforce, workloads, and office.

5 methods to enhance safety posture in 2022

In abstract, the overarching mission for CISOs and their safety groups is to guard their establishments whereas sustaining enterprise continuity.

Listed below are 5 ways in which healthcare organizations can enhance their safety posture this yr:

  1. Deploy endpoint and malware safety for gadgets and customers
  2. Automate IT and safety duties to cut back menace dangers
  3. Undertake a zero-trust safety framework to assist stop unauthorized entry
  4. Check incident response plans, conduct common threat assessments and desk tops with enterprise alignment
  5. Leverage menace intelligence instruments to proactively establish, mitigate, and remediate safety threats

Because the world’s largest supplier of networking, collaboration, and safety applied sciences, Cisco is dedicated to addressing the safety challenges of the healthcare trade. We encourage you to discover our cybersecurity options for healthcare in larger depth in our portfolio explorer tool.

 


Sources

1 Fashionable Healthcare, Scripps Well being cyberattack value the corporate $113 M, August 11, 2021
2 The Forrester New Wave: Linked Medical System Safety Q2 2020, June 1, 2020
3 Information Bridge Market Analysis: Sensible Medical Units Market 20.1% of CAGR by 2021

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