Healthcare, even in a non-hospital office setting, requires informed and prompt decisions. In addition to clinical knowledge, frontline workers such as doctors, physician assistants, nurses and medical researchers must have quick and safe access to the information they need to deliver the best care possible to their patients. However, the industry is under siege.
The pummeling is two-fold: one punch is the COVID pandemic and all the challenges it brings to delivering patient care, but there are second punches come from bad actors looking for ways to steal personal information of patients, as well as the rising threat of ransomware with patient and business data held hostage for payment. In the first five months of 2020, there were more than 250 major security breaches at healthcare organizations. That frightening trend continues.
Traditional perimeter-based (castle and moat) security is extremely vulnerable to modern attack vectors. Once a bad actor is through the wall, they have relatively easy access to everything, especially when they can compromise an identity with privileged access. Then, they can do whatever disruptive or destructive things they like, such as quietly copy and steal data, lock up your systems with a ransomware attack or worse.
What can healthcare organizations do? How can they protect their data and continue to deliver the level of care needed? By implementing a Zero Trust security model in which no one has standing access to any resource but the very basic, compulsory ones. To access sensitive and privileged resources, access must be approved, issued to the user to do that specific task and then access is immediately cut off.
The Zero Trust mantra is Never trust, Verify Everything. External or internal users, on-prem devices and third-party resources, such as SaaS applications, should all be treated as attack vectors. Anything that cannot be verified is denied access.
That sounds very secure, but it also sounds like a huge drag on productivity. However, with the right solutions and implementation, a Zero Trust security model can be both secure and quick. For healthcare organizations both aspects of this are extremely important. The interconnected nature of modern technology opens the door for amazing (by today’s perspective) collaboration and supremely informed decisions, ala access to research data, pharma information, AI/robotic process automation and even remotely controlled surgeries.
With a focus on identity-centric security, protecting data and leveraging just-in-time provisioning, the healthcare industry – and others – can achieve a Zero Trust security model.
One Identity’s experience in healthcare includes supporting nine of the top 10 healthcare organizations included in the global Fortune 1000. We’re also a proven leader in the identity access and management (IAM) and identity governance and administration (IGA) arenas.
We’ve consolidated resources to highlight how your organization can leverage our unified identity security platform to deliver the healthcare services to your patients and business coordination with your partners.
