Follow along with our blog series #HealthcareNow and #PublicSectorNow, where we'll address healthcare innovation around the world and how to maintain business continuity in today's health climate. 

This year has brought unprecedented challenge and opportunity for healthcare organizations as they look to secure their patients, clinicians, care teams, endpoints and data.

With the shift to remote work, heightened demand for telehealth and virtual care, and more devices and connections on the network, there has never been a more critical time to address the cybersecurity strategy within your healthcare organization.

Unfortunately, cybercrime hasn't stopped or slowed because of the global pandemic. In fact, earlier this year the FBI reported a 400% increase in daily cybersecurity complaints since the pandemic began.

So, how do you build a strong defense to enhance patient safety and protect your healthcare organization from cybersecurity breaches?

To understand and identify security practices that drive successful outcomes, Cisco conducted a fully anonymous survey of over 4,800 active IT, security and privacy professionals from around the world. Of those participants, 281 represented healthcare organizations.

The result? A Security Outcomes Study and a mini report specifically on healthcare that empower security leaders around the world to protect against cyber attacks and drive business growth.

Key Takeaways 

Of the healthcare participants surveyed, 51.2% felt they were meeting compliance regulations, 49.1% said they are gaining executives' confidence in the security program, 45.9% said they were successfully avoiding major incidents and 43.8% said they were managing top risks. See the figure below for how healthcare organizations reported success rates across various outcomes. Note that the mean rate of success is 42%.

When it came to defining the strategies that help enable successful security outcomes within healthcare organizations, the survey looked at three categories -enabling the business, managing risk and operating efficiently.

To enable the business, healthcare organizations noted that proactive tech refresh plays a significant role in success. Those who let their infrastructure degrade and only update when things break showed significantly reduced rates of success in enabling the business.

For managing risk, proactive tech refresh was again in the top three strategies. Other strategies for success include timely incident response and prompt disaster recovery.

Lastly, in the category of operating efficiently, the top success strategy was again proactive tech refresh, with well-integrated tech and effective use of automation as other top strategies.

So, what can we gather from this report? Organizations who take a proactive approach to defining their cybersecurity strategy and maintaining security posture with tech refresh have greater success than those who don't.

To get more key insights from the healthcare study, please read the Security Outcomes Study for Healthcare.

To see how the healthcare industry compares to other industries and organizations, please read the Security Outcomes Study.

We'd love to hear what you think. Comment below and stay tuned for the next blog in our #HealthcareNow series.