Healthcare

Healthcare is in the throes of a massive digital transformation powered by the synergies of Edge Computing and AI. COVID-19 has accelerated the development of delivery ecosystems for patient-centric, preventive, value-based healthcare services. Telehealth, precision medicine, predictive and personalized care are reshaping the industry today.

Challenges facing Digital Revolution

Cybersecurity Ventures warns that “Outdated systems, lack of experienced cyber personnel, highly valuable data, and added incentive to pay ransoms to regain patient data are magnetizing cybercriminals.” De facto, healthcare has one of the highest rates of legacy operating systems, such as Windows XP, including those on medical devices at the edge, leaving vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit. The Protenus Breach Barometer indicates that over 41.4 million patient records were exposed by 572 data breaches in 2019, while hacking incidents surged.

The move to edge poses serious challenges that need to be addressed:

• Digitally connecting dispersed and/or nomadic healthcare devices, such as glucometers, dialysis machines, blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters, etc. increases the attack surface.
• IBM Security estimates the average cost of a data leak to be $8.64 million. While cyber insurance policies may provide some coverage for cyberattacks, these are unlikely to cover all losses or all types of claims.
• The selected solution must be future-proof and flexible to adapt to an evolving business and technology landscape.

Xaptum’s Solutions

Extending Xaptum’s SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) fabric to connected healthcare provides the following key benefits:

Isolation & Segmentation

To mitigate the growing attack surfaces and cyber risk exposure, the ENF uses default-deny firewall rules in isolating remote endpoints, protecting their digital traffic and masking their public identities. It enables seamless microsegmentation to virtually partition healthcare premises/networks into policy-based security zones.

Visibility & Awareness

Dispersed healthcare devices are assigned unique, permanent IP identities to allow persistent tracking, remote monitoring, and management from a central pane-of-glass dashboard. The resulting visibility can be leveraged to assess underwritten risks, while instrumentalizing end-to-end data trails to quantify exposure. The ENF comes with native secure remote access, facilitating the seamless convergence of connected healthcare services and devices.

Interoperable Turnkey Deployment

ENF’s military-grade security is essentially offered as a solution-ready package (SRP) to manage dispersed and demanding edge applications. Such prepackaging goes hand in hand with the plug-and-play functionality for any modern or Linux-compatible gateway/router. Please refer to FAQs to learn more about its flexibility over last-mile connectivity to further help end-customers cut costs and accelerate deployments globally.