Enhancing Cybersecurity Fortitude in the Healthcare Sector's Operations
In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, healthcare organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of cyber resilience. A recent CDW white paper suggests that a well-executed zero-trust approach can serve as an "accelerator for progressive organizations," supporting efficiency and bolstering resilience.
One such example of digital transformation in healthcare is Southern Maryland's CalvertHealth, which migrated its electronic health record recovery site to the cloud. Melissa Hall, the Chief Nursing Officer and Vice President of Clinical Services at CalvertHealth, hailed the migration as a "huge win" for patient care delivery, ensuring business continuity in the face of potential cyber threats.
The migration underscores a growing focus on threat prevention within the healthcare sector. Cyberattacks have become a significant concern, necessitating inclusion in response plans. As highlighted by a Cisco report, nearly two-thirds of respondents experienced a security incident that affected their resilience, with a majority occurring over the past two years.
To build cyber resilience, healthcare organizations can adopt strategies that prioritize secure data backup and recovery, critical systems protection, and observable and automated IT infrastructure management.
Secure Backup and Recovery: Employing data backup solutions that use air gapping (isolating backups from the main network) and immutability (ensuring backups cannot be altered), alongside robust access controls, can prevent ransomware or wiper malware from compromising backup data, enabling rapid recovery.
Prioritizing Critical Systems: Identifying and protecting the most critical systems and their dependencies, such as servers, routers, and firewalls, ensures these key assets remain resilient during attacks.
Observability Solutions: Implementing full-stack observability strategies enhances visibility into infrastructure and application performance, aiding early detection of issues, rapid troubleshooting, and maintaining system availability crucial for patient care.
Leveraging Advanced Technologies: Utilizing AI and machine learning (AIOps) for predictive analytics and automated remediation can proactively prevent disruptions and optimize IT services.
By integrating these approaches, healthcare organizations can enhance their ability to withstand cyberattacks, minimize downtime, and ensure continuity of care in increasingly hostile cyber environments.
This focus on cyber resilience is echoed by other healthcare providers. Pittsburgh-based Highmark Health is highlighting its ongoing journey towards zero-trust security, emphasizing the importance of minimum necessary and least privilege principles, as demonstrated by Soo Yi, Highmark's Director of Platform Security.
Cisco also suggests that extended detection and response, secure access service edge, and mature zero-trust implementations can significantly boost an organization's resilience. HealthTech has identified stronger zero-trust security adoption among healthcare organizations as a trend for 2023.
In conclusion, as healthcare organizations of all sizes, including those serving rural populations, recognize the importance of being prepared for cyber threats, partnerships such as CDW's with Cisco become increasingly valuable, enabling healthcare providers to access a broad suite of security and cloud tools tailored for resilience. Organizations should prepare for the inevitability of a cyberattack, focusing on maintaining operations, minimizing harm, recovery, and learning to improve strategies.
- To complement their focus on cyber resilience, healthcare organizations, such as CalvertHealth, are also exploring therapies-and-treatments like zero-trust strategies, employing secure data backup solutions, and leveraging advanced technologies like AI and machine learning (AIOps).
- As cyberattacks pose a significant threat to health-and-wellness, with nearly two-thirds of respondents experiencing security incidents, science and technology play crucial roles in developing therapies-and-treatments for cybersecurity, ensuring that organizations remain resilient and maintain operations for the benefit of patient care.
