Cybersecurity has become a strategic imperative for healthcare organizations. Data breaches increased 650% in 2021 and the associated costs increased 29.5%. The rising adoption of telehealth, a mobile workforce, and the emergence of connected medical devices have all contributed to expanding cyber risk, complexity, and cost.
As with many critical industries, healthcare delivery is undergoing a digital transformation. Fast and secure access to cloud resources is required, and Zscaler helps securely migrate from on-premises network infrastructure to the cloud using zero trust principles.
Trusted by some of the top healthcare systems around the world, Zscaler has now invested in a dedicated practice to help our nation's healthcare systems better protect their data and improve patient outcomes. Check out our new Zscaler for healthcare page for more on how we can help solve the challenges that are unique to health systems today.
How can zero trust reduce the threats to your healthcare organization? Let’s look at four key areas: ransomware, infrastructure cost, new care models, and work-from-anywhere user experience.
Ransomware
The adoption of telemedicine, cloud, and IoT have created new avenues for bad actors to gain access to valuable healthcare data and systems. According to a recent report from the Ponemon Institute, 89% of healthcare organizations surveyed experienced cyberattacks in the past 12 months, with an average total cost for the single most expensive cyberattack at $4.4 million. Further, an average cost of $1.1 million was lost in productivity as a result of these attacks.
Zero trust is a highly effective strategy for combating ransomware attacks. The most practical way to keep hackers out of your network is to eliminate the attack surface. If it’s not reachable, it’s not breachable. Zscaler restricts malicious access to a healthcare system’s network by making the internet the network for digital work, or extending the service to your on-premises environment securely.
The resulting decrease in attack surface has been proven to reduce the number of malicious attacks by more than 50%.
Infrastructure Cost
Healthcare organizations must make considerable investments in IT systems at a time when the very care models themselves are evolving. Hybrid cloud architectures are becoming the new standard and extensive industry consolidation is resulting in business and clinical applications migrating to the cloud to improve efficiency and reduce administrative costs.
Zscaler helps healthcare organizations connect branches, clinics, care centers, and clinicians to the internet by leveraging multiple network connection types. This optimizes application traffic routing and performance while reducing WAN costs and network operational expenses. Zscaler helps ease this transition by allowing existing systems to remain in place while providing a more secure way to access them.
Healthcare mergers and acquisitions (M&A) volume was up 16% in 2021 and the outlook for 2022 is strong. M&A are challenging for IT as the IT team is responsible for ensuring appropriate connectivity to applications and the security of sensitive data while consolidating complex legacy networks and security infrastructure. Zscaler customers experience up to a 70% reduction in overall infrastructure costs and reduce M&A integration timelines from months to weeks.
Care-From-Anywhere
Healthcare is transitioning to a more accessible model. An “omnicare” or care-from-anywhere approach combines telehealth, in-office visits, remote monitoring, and other modes of treatment to make healthcare more efficient, effective, and affordable. With data dispersed across many different platforms, protecting it is a massive challenge. Add in the increasing number of endpoints created by the internet of medical things (IoMT), and healthcare organizations are finding themselves at risk from extensive unpatched vulnerabilities.
The FBI issued a Private Industry Notification on September 12, 2022 that declared that unpatched and outdated medical devices provide cyberattack opportunities. More than 53% of connected medical devices and other IoMT devices in hospitals had known critical vulnerabilities. Leaving such devices insecure makes the entire healthcare facility vulnerable to cyberattacks, endangering patient health and worker safety.
The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange helps healthcare organizations secure and simplify the connectivity brought on by this expanding healthcare model, allowing new applications and devices to be easily added to the enterprise. Customers can increase bandwidth by more than 100%, achieve 99% application availability, and see a 100% reduction in network outages.
Work-From-Anywhere
Healthcare organizations are increasingly adopting new and innovative approaches to respond to staffing constraints, including the ability to work remotely. A 2022 MGMA Stat poll found that 59% of medical group practices have shifted workers to permanent remote or hybrid work in the past year. This dramatically increases the number of devices connecting to and from your network, potentially expanding the attack surface and opportunities for bad actors. In addition, traditional security architectures require a user to access the network through a VPN with all data backhauled through the data center, creating latency and a poor user experience.
Zscaler provides a secure work-from-anywhere experience, enabling access to applications from any location, on any device. Only the right users get access to the right information and systems when they need it. The Zero Trust Exchange provides the ability to decrypt and inspect 100% of all SSL/TLS traffic at scale, keeping data secure at every step and improving employee productivity by up to 80% with near-zero latency.
Data Protection Transformed
Ransomware, data breaches, and careless user behavior put your data in harm’s way. Zscaler is announcing industry-first innovations that revolutionize how organizations classify and protect data.
Join us on Tuesday, October 18 for Zscaler’s Data Protection Transformed event to see how to solve today’s most difficult data protection challenges.
Zscaler is trusted by some of the largest healthcare organizations in the world to secure their users and applications. From HIPAA compliance to securing connected medical devices and remote employees, Zscaler sets the standard for digital transformation.
Contact us today for more information or to see a live demo. And follow our Zscaler for Public Sector LinkedIn page for regular updates.
