Increasing reliance on technology in the healthcare industry expands risk exponentially. How can you protect yourself against such risks?

Healthcare has transformed over the past century from a largely palliative care delivery model to an advanced, technology-infused, and increasingly digitally integrated model. This model has fueled massive improvements in patient outcomes and improve the human condition. This was the subject of my presentation today at the HIMSS19 Eurasia Conference held in Istanbul, Turkey.

The number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) systems surpassed the global human population sometime around 2007-2008. Today, there are in excess of 20 billion IoT devices connected to the Internet, and most have little to no security designed into them at all! Estimates suggest that by 2050 there will be in excess of 1 trillion connected devices—many of them employed in healthcare.

Increasing use of artificial intelligence and personalized genomic medicines will continue to push the boundaries of healthcare forward. But digitization comes at a cost, with advancement comes new cybersecurity risks to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of personal health data through the IT systems that are relied upon to provide care to patients. In fact, in today’s healthcare delivery model, clinicians would find it extremely difficult to maintain the current levels of patient care if health IT systems—and increasingly healthcare IoT—are not available to diagnose, treat, manage, and monitor patients.

With so many endpoints in our hospitals and clinics, how do we even go about tackling this expanded threat landscape? A good start is adopting a risk-based approach to healthcare security.

You can’t assess what you don’t know about, and with such a large number of medical devices and other HIoT systems, identifying even a basic inventory of IoT assets is an almost impossible manual task given the ever-increasing number of connected devices.

Where Tools like Cylera's MedCommand™ Platform Come In.

Cylera's MedCommand™ platform will identify HIoT assets, perform a full risk analysis of each device and device type, profile the legitimate traffic patterns of each device type for zero-trust security controls, alert on any anomalous traffic detected outside of legitimate traffic patterns, and even automatically remediate discovered risks with compensating security controls via a hospital’s existing network access control and/or firewall technology.

To learn more, please contact us for a no-obligation solution walk-through and demonstration.

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