Cybersecurity continues to be a pain point in healthcare

Cybersecurity is a critical pain point for healthcare organizations of all sizes and specialties. The industry faces a unique threat landscape as a successful breach could threaten life-critical services, the delivery of life-saving drugs, and prevent healthcare professionals from delivering patient care.

As increasingly sophisticated attack vectors emerge, like phishing, ransomware, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, your healthcare IT risk goes beyond financial loss and loss of privacy. Increasingly, managed IT services are crucial to ensuring security posture, controls, and defenses are in place to protect your patients, staff, and data. And regardless of the size of your healthcare practice, it’s imperative to understand that your organization is a target for cybercriminals.

The size of healthcare’s cybersecurity risk

The threat to healthcare organizations is growing as hackers increasingly target their valuable personal healthcare information (PHI). Healthcare has faced the costliest breaches of any industry for over a decade. The average breach cost organizations a record high of $10.1 million in 2022, an increase of nearly $1 million on 2021, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report.

These sky-high returns have led to a surge in cybercriminals targeting the industry. Infoblox research found the U.S. healthcare sector suffered 521 major data breaches in 2021, a 25% increase on 2020, which impacted more than 43 million patient records. 

That threat is only increasing as new breaches target specialty healthcare firms, and new attack vectors are discovered daily.

Taking the fight back to cybercriminals

As new sophisticated threats emerge, you need to strengthen your security posture and defenses to protect patients and staff, secure your data, maintain a high quality of care, and deliver streamlined operations. Tactics and best practices you need to provide this include:

Improved visibility

You can only stop the security threats you can see, so it’s vital to ensure you have monitoring technology to discover and prevent vulnerabilities across your entire network.

Removing third-party risks

Vulnerabilities in third-party software are the third-most common and costly form of data breach, accounting for 13% of attacks and costing $4.55 million per breach, according to IBM research. So it’s vital to have the right tools in place to manage third-party risks effectively and onboard new vendors securely.

Employee awareness

Your employees are your first line of defense against security attacks. They need to be aware of the risks they face, the tactics cybercriminals use to target them, and be able to spot the signs of a potential malicious attack.

Robust security controls

Technologies that discover, block, and mitigate all security incidents help you to enhance data control. A minimum security measure is enforcing the use of multi-factor authentication by all staff. This ensures only authorized employees can access the data and systems they have the right to – which helps to prevent a data breach even if an attacker obtains an employee’s password. Other security controls include anti-virus, data loss prevention, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, mobile device management, network segmentation, threat intelligence, and vulnerability scans.

Why you need healthcare-focused managed IT services

Fighting your growing cybersecurity threats alone demands significant staffing, technology, and time investment. It requires a proactive approach to security that protects you against emerging threats, enhances your security posture, and ensures compliance with increasingly stringent industry and regulatory requirements. 

Managed IT services remove the manual effort of protecting your patients’ PHI data, networks, and systems around the clock without hiring an expensive internal security team. It provides a 24/7 understanding of your risk, including new and emerging threats, and enables you to block and mitigate threats as soon as they emerge.

Bolster your security posture with Dedicated IT

Our managed IT services provide you with all the expertise and tools required to make your business better tomorrow than you are today. We help you implement a robust cybersecurity program tailored to your specific requirements, proactively discover, block, and mitigate sophisticated threats, meet regulatory expectations, and satisfy cyber insurance requirements.

Discover how Dedicated IT helps you fight the latest cybersecurity threats facing the healthcare industry and implement all the controls you need to protect your patients, staff, and data. Contact us today to get started.