Healthcare IoT Security Challenges And How Unified SASE Can Help

Over the last decade, the healthcare industry has become increasingly reliant on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, such as smart medical equipment that communicates data to IT equipment, which stores it in electronic medical record systems. While this growth has unquestionably improved the quality of healthcare services, it has also exposed the sector to insurmountable security issues.

A cyberattack on smart medical equipment can have serious effects, such as disrupting crucial patient care and raising operational costs. So, how can the healthcare business strengthen its resilience in the face of an ever-increasing danger landscape?

Key Points:

Cyberattacks on healthcare infrastructure can directly impact human life, disrupting critical patient treatment and increasing operational costs.
The healthcare industry struggles with IoT security due to the complexity of healthcare networks, the age and vulnerability of medical devices, and stringent regulations.
Unified SASE is a comprehensive, layered security solution that can help healthcare providers address their security needs by consolidating network security and WAN functionalities into a single cloud-native service.
Unified SASE can help healthcare providers improve security, reduce costs, and avert high-risk situations such as ransomware attacks.

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Impact of Cyberattacks on the Healthcare Industry

Cyberattacks in the healthcare sector are on the rise, with a noticeable increase in ransomware instances. These illicit acts undermine patient services and care delivery, putting healthcare providers and the general public at risk.

Attacks against healthcare infrastructure, unlike other cyber threats, can have a direct impact on human life. A ransomware assault, for example, may target a hospital and affect the laptop that controls a heart bypass unit. This could cause the machine to become uncontrollable or to stop circulating blood, endangering the patient’s life. Callous thieves rely on healthcare providers’ desperation to satisfy ransom demands in order to restore disrupted patient services.

In addition to disrupting patient services, medical data is a highly valuable target for cybercriminal gangs. It can be sold on the dark web for a fast buck, or it can be used to perpetrate additional crimes like fraud or identity theft. Such data breaches not only help thieves, but they also put strain on healthcare providers. Patients who have had their data taken feel betrayed, and if the source of the breach is discovered to be within the healthcare facility, it may face severe regulatory consequences.

IoT Security Challenges in Healthcare

Due to the complexity of healthcare networks, securing IoT devices is particularly difficult. Highly expensive medical equipment, such as MRI and CAT scanners, cost millions of dollars, so ‘tear and replace’ is not an option.

Furthermore, updating and patching these old and vulnerable devices causes security teams a lot of issues because the software built in these devices was not created with security and accessibility in mind.

Finally, tight laws put in place to protect medical data complicate the security of IoT devices. Compliance with these guidelines can be extremely difficult, especially when managing several devices from various manufacturers, each with its own set of security flaws and vulnerabilities.

Closing security gaps in IoT healthcare

Addressing healthcare security requires a comprehensive, layered system capable of managing a huge and sophisticated IT environment. The solution must also be economically effective and manageable for IT and security teams with limited resources.

The adoption of Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a feasible way to harmonize these competing goals. Unified SASE is a cloud-based solution that combines network security and wide-area networking (WAN) functionality. It presents a comprehensive strategy for safeguarding a wide range of remote access points, including IoT devices.

Unified SASE solutions combine many security features, such as advanced threat prevention and Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) services, to provide real-time threat identification and neutralization. Furthermore, URL filtering is a useful function for limiting user access to specified websites in order to reduce exposure to dangerous online content. Finally, Unified SASE includes Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) functionality for visibility and control over cloud services, assuring sensitive data protection.

How Unified SASE Can Assist?

Unified SASE is a comprehensive, layered security solution that can assist healthcare providers in meeting their security needs by combining network security and WAN functionality into a single cloud-native service. It presents a comprehensive strategy for safeguarding a wide range of remote access points, including IoT devices.

Unified SASE can assist healthcare providers in addressing the sector’s primary issues – enhancing security while lowering costs.

Enhanced security: Unified SASE enhances security by adding security features such as micro-segmentation, which reduces the impact of online attacks. Micro-segmentation is very useful for healthcare practitioners that have a large number of networked devices. If an attack compromises any medical IoT asset, the threat is limited to a specific network segment, limiting the impact and allowing other critical patient services to continue uninterrupted.
Lower costs: By unifying diverse security services onto a single platform, unified SASE helps to lower expenditures. This enables healthcare organizations to optimize their security operations while lowering the costs of administering various security systems.
High-risk circumstances avoided: Unified SASE can also assist healthcare professionals in avoiding high-risk situations such as ransomware attacks. Unified SASE can identify and neutralize threats before they cause harm by applying sophisticated security methods such as advanced threat protection and intrusion prevention. This protects the organization’s data and systems, assuring the continuous delivery of patient care.