Telehealth and telemedicine services have become a fundamental part of healthcare during the pandemic. And, now after 6 months of having access to non-emergent care through portals and digital front doors, patients and clinicians have embraced the platform. But the proliferation of endpoints that patients, clinicians, and practice managers need in order to use telehealth and telemedicine services has created multiple new threat vectors that if not secured increase the possibility of a major security breach. With so much to protect healthcare, IT leaders must focus on security. This article was originally shared on Government Technology Insider, with advice for federal IT leaders but the same insight can help healthcare IT leaders in their on-going quest for more robust security and more resilient infrastructures.
To stay agile in today’s evolving security environment, government agencies must change their approach to cybersecurity to take into account the impact that distributed environments and network architecture updates have on their existing security posture. The days of defined perimeter controls are over and it’s time to move to an environment that closes the visibility gap. According to a recent FedScoop report, this enables agencies to not only defends against cyber threats but respond while keeping budgets and resources under control.
As agencies move systems, apps, and data to the cloud, solutions that offer a dynamic, automated threat response are needed, said Ron Bushar, Government CTO at FireEye. We “can now come in and deploy what we know about every variant of ransomware we’re seeing around the world and start to look for it within minutes, regardless of which technology an agency is using,” he said. “We can immediately say: It’s probably this group. Here are the techniques they use. Here’s how they got in. Here’s where to look to find where they deployed their ransomware. And here’s the best way to go about isolating this and getting your systems back online.”
This in-depth knowledge powered by automated cyber tools is helping agencies better their cyber posture, which is an urgent need for agencies. Solutions that offer visibility work to better secure an agency’s environment which is “the essential foundation of any cloud security strategy, whether that strategy revolves around compliance assurance, threat hunting, policy governance or risk remediation,” shared Martin Holste, Cloud CTO at FireEye.
Holste shared that this visibility comes from three main things:
• A complete inventory of all relevant assets at all times.
• Contextual details on the current state of every asset.
• The complete historical record of security events for each asset.
But it can be difficult to have a solid read on these areas, especially if this is all being done manually. “IT systems and applications change on a daily basis,” said Major General Earl Matthews (Ret.), Vice President of Strategy for Mandiant Security Validation. “New applications are being deployed; tools are upgraded; equipment gets changed out. If your entire IT environment is changing every day, the question that needs to be answered is: Are your security control systems keeping up and how do you know for sure?”
And that’s where automated cyber tools deliver answers. With automatic patching, system updates, and application inventory, these solutions take the guesswork out of protecting your data, and if a threat presents itself, the tools go to work protecting information and defending the network.
“At a high level, we’re really trying to enable, in the fastest and most seamless way possible, everything we know and learn about adversaries—their tools, their techniques, their motivations, and their intent—and get that to our customers in the way that they want to consume it—at machine speed,” Bushar concluded.
Are you ready to increase the efficiency of your cyber tools? Click here to read the full report.
