3 cybersecurity strategies for healthcare leaders in a digital-first world

From on-demand healthcare services like telehealth to wearable technologies, predictive healthcare to blockchain technologies for electronic health records, or 5G for healthcare services to AI and augmented reality for state-of-the-art medical treatments, the healthcare industry is at an inflection point. These digital transformations also bring along elevated cybersecurity risks.

Earlier this year, in a comprehensive cybersecurity benchmarking study conducted by ThoughtLab, the healthcare industry was found to be lacking in maturity from a cybersecurity implementation standpoint, placed only slightly ahead of the media and entertainment industry and industrial manufacturing.

[Download the report: Cybersecurity solutions for a riskier world]

Healthcare companies can take advantage of the following three proven cybersecurity strategies to accelerate their readiness to operate in a highly digital world.

Continuous monitoring of critical assets 

On an average, organizations take 128 days to detect a breach — a timeline that could completely cripple mission critical applications and services in healthcare. To detect a threat in real-time, healthcare companies need the ability to continuously monitor their critical assets, analyze user behavior in their networks, track smart devices, and look for anomalies in events and end-user activity.

Choosing the right SIEM solution can be the very first step in addressing vulnerabilities across people, processes, and technologies. In fact, the COO of a German healthcare provider believes that his organization’s investment in the right SIEM was the most effective cybersecurity investment toward detecting and identifying threats at scale and even recommending the right remediation plan.

[Check out the SIEM buyer’s guide to help you pick the right SIEM for your business.]

Outsourcing security operations for enhanced security with optimal spend

Approximately 30% of the world’s data volume is generated by healthcare.¹ In a post-pandemic world, this trend will only see an uptick with massive data collection efforts to thwart risks of another pandemic. Compound that with the unprecedented shortage of skilled cybersecurity workers,² and we can see why many healthcare firms prefer to outsource security operations to managed security service providers (MSSP) and managed detection and response (MDR) firms. MSSPs and MDRs can help healthcare organizations with their cybersecurity needs by bringing in industry best practices, monitoring and responding to cyber threats for healthcare services and assets 24/7, and relieving internal resources for better patient care and healthcare services, while ensuring organizations remain fully compliant to mandates like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

[Find out how Proficio, an Elastic partner, helps healthcare organizations meet stringent cybersecurity needs.]

[Learn more about Elastic Security and Compliance.]

Protecting applications and workloads in the cloud 

While compliance, operational agility, and better patient care have driven cloud adoption in the healthcare industry, cloud security continues to be a major challenge.³ Legacy security solutions are not designed to cope with the complexity and ephemeral nature of cloud-based applications.

Cloud adoption is also a journey. As multi clouds and hybrid cloud architectures evolve, healthcare organizations will need security solutions that can protect their workloads, irrespective of where the information resides and how it flows in the data architecture. Having access to security experts and their research work can be of significant advantage to internal IT and security teams in reducing mean time to identify, detect, and respond to threats in the network. Healthcare companies can also seek support from MSSPs and MDRs to configure their systems correctly, avoiding security loopholes and as needed, consult experts for their overall security strategy along their cloud transformation journey.

[Learn more about Elastic Security Labs.]

Building toward a better patient experience

In today’s digital first world, cybersecurity is an imperative, especially when it comes to a mission critical service such as healthcare. The healthcare industry needs trusted partners in security to continue delivering the best patient care while keeping their patient data secure. It also needs the right tools, processes, and people to minimize the impact in case of an unfortunate security breach. Find out how Elastic Security and Proficio can bring the best of security solutions and managed security services.

Learn more about the Elastic Partner Program.