In a time when healthcare organizations are facing cyberthreats that threaten to expose millions of patient records each year, a risk-based security strategy can help providers take a holistic approach to security, protect data, and prioritize and mitigate risks. Let’s take a look at the foundational elements of that strategy.

Security Services for Small Providers

A lot of healthcare organizations who are ill-equipped to provide a full range of security services internally address the issue by contracting with vendors who offer security services. For example, security operations centre capabilities on a contract basis are offered by managed security service providers to the clients. Organizations that are unable to staff their own Security Operations Centre (SOC) on a continuous basis can hire a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) to monitor their security infrastructure around the clock for anomalies. The MSSP may either immediately execute a planned response or escalate the issue to the organization’s own security team for resolution when it detects a suspicious activity.

Assessment of internal infrastructure might also demand the attention of healthcare organizations and they can turn to the service providers for the assistance. MSSPs can offer a wide variety of services, from vulnerability scanning services that constantly monitor client networks for vulnerable systems and provide a remediation workflow that allows engineers to monitor the status of issue resolution to penetration testing capabilities that use trained ethical hackers to probe an organization’s defences using the same tools leveraged by cybercriminals. These attacks allow organizations to correct issues that pose a significant risk of exploitation by providing valuable insight into an organization’s security posture.