FEATURE: INTERNET OF THINGS
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Operating with a
traditional security
mindset is no longer an
option when attempting
to keep pace with today’s
threat landscape. Baber
Amin, CTO Office, Ping
Identity, discusses
how Zero Trust and its
granular consent-based
authorisation can help
healthcare secure itself
and seize important
innovations in treatment
based on real time
information sharing.
H
ospitals and medical centres tend
to privilege one key attribute in IT:
access. At any one time, patient
data, medical records, schedules,
email and everything else is flying from one
part of an organisation to the other. And in this
environment, it matters even more because
the speed at which a medical professional can
get access to that information could impinge
directly on the health and safety of a patient.
And because the health sector was largely
disconnected from the wider online world,
we could rely on that attribute. Not anymore.
The medical field is connecting itself. In
recent years, the healthcare sector has
largely taken up Electronic Health Records
(EHRs) as a replacement to pen and paper
records. To boot, legacy systems and devices
which were never intended to be networked
are now being connected and opened to a
whole array of online threats.
There are plenty of disciplines and fields
undergoing similar transformations. With
the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) –
industries which once only had to worry
about IT doing its job effectively are now
being forced to change their perspective.
Take critical infrastructure – there are plenty
of energy facilities that were designed to
protect against failures and accidents but
never attacks. In fairness, they never had
to – many such facilities were completely
air gapped from the outside world and
for a long time, their primary concern was
whether the computers could do their job
and whether there were appropriate physical
security controls in place.
Now, Digital Transformation is forcing those
devices to connect to a world that is riddled
with threats and cybercriminals looking to
make their fortune or just cause disruption.
Medicine is not just being forced to reckon
with the cyberthreats that so long laid off,
but are also on the verge of their own digital
revolution which promises to transform the
state of medical technology – but if handled
poorly could spell disaster.
IoT has found a rich vein in medicine. And
everything from insulin pens to cancer
monitoring systems to inhalers to ingestible
sensors to contact lenses will soon be
connected into great glimmering endpoint-
ridden medical networks – providing better
information to healthcare providers and
improving patient care. That is, if they can
secure them.
Not that those potentially catastrophic
security incidents weren’t already a threat.
How Zero Trust can
secure healthcare IoT
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