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“Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) security require varying approaches, but both are crucial to maintaining a safe and secure healthcare environment. As a result, organisations should not forget to prioritise OT security alongside its IT security efforts.”

Health Care Security Challenges

IT and OT cyber security require varying approaches, but both are crucial to maintaining a safe and secure healthcare environment. From a traditional CIA triad perspective, IT and OT are fundamentally different, while IT security focuses on safeguarding electronic data confidentiality, OT security focuses on device availability and data integrity. But as digital transformation efforts and the Internet of Things (IoT) take hold across the healthcare sector, many organisations have and continue to converge IT and OT in order to streamline workflows and increase functionality through the connectivity of digital and physical environments. While this convergence can reduce inefficiencies and help organisations reduce costs, it also presents additional cyber security risks.

With increasing cyber security risks, tougher regulations, and complex interconnected system environments, organisations need a simple, centralised way to administer enterprise cyber security that encompasses both OT and IT.

Situational Awareness

As threat actors continue to evolve and learn how to leverage new vulnerabilities, Healthcare organisations (e.g. hospitals, medical centres etc) need a combination of technology supported by robust procedural processes that enable teams to identify exposure early and prevent or mitigate harm. It is essential that Healthcare organisations develop a security strategy based on proven cyber security practices that are aligned with key industry considerations, objectives and evolving regulatory requirements. Healthcare organisations should incorporate OT security strategies that also reflect the current state of their environments (e.g. determining where they’re most vulnerable). At the tactical level, this means addressing common vulnerabilities, such as out-of-date software or communication protocols that do not support stronger security measures. At a strategic level, this could see the fortification of the network by adding technical capabilities that enable visibility and control of traffic flows.

Health Care and Medical Risk Management

The first step in this journey is to understand risk and consequences to the organisation. At a basic level, this means identifying the most critical OT functions essential to fulfilling the organisation’s business operations, and the potential consequences of a cyber attack against them. The knowledge of an organisation’s system custodians and engineers should be leveraged to identify methods an adversary could use to compromise critical OT functions. This valuable knowledge includes technical system architecture details, procedural and ways of working insights, like logical user access, third-party service provider scope, supply chain considerations, physical security etc. Real-world cyber scenarios seen across industries should be considered, of course, not all will be applicable, but to ensure completeness and due diligence they should be considered.

Call to Action

Operating a Healthcare or medical asset without an appropriate OT cyber security strategy and relevant controls is high risk. To help you discover your level of risk exposure and to illustrate how we can support effective OT cyber security return on investment, get in touch for a free 30-min consultation.