Another HIMSS has come and gone, and we want to take a moment to thank everyone who met with us and stopped by our booth during the show. It was a busy week, but we left Orlando feeling energized and optimistic to hear from our customers on the focus and importance being placed around cybersecurity within their organizations.
It’s a new world, and traditional security approaches won’t protect you in the Cloud Generation. Healthcare workers have become more mobile, creating new identities and personas in the cloud that can be linked to literally dozens of different mobile and IoT devices – especially as more and more medical devices and wearables connect to the network. Sensitive data – from electronic protected health information to patients’ financial records – lives everywhere.
At Symantec, we work with our healthcare customers to develop an integrated cyber defense platform, where all technologies, services, and intelligence they depend on work together to protect their users, information, messaging infrastructure, and the Web.
This kind of holistic defense strategy is critical in light of our new research study, released at HIMSS17, which examines where healthcare organizations stand with their investments and efforts to strengthen their security postures. While cybersecurity budgets and staffing commitments are slowly growing, many healthcare organizations are lagging, with 65% of respondents still spending less than 6% of their IT budgets on security, and a significant number still in the very early stages of addressing security for both medical and mobile devices.
It is time to pick up the pace. Cybersecurity is much more than an IT problem; it can have real implications for patient care, a reality that our industry cannot afford to overlook. As my colleague Bob Chaput, chief executive officer of Clearwater Compliance, noted in our eBook, “If organizations continue to ignore the strategic importance of information risk management, we are going to continue to see an upsurge in breaches, an increase in failed audits, and additional successful cyberattacks.”
Of course, there are actionable steps healthcare organizations can take to drastically improve their cybersecurity postures and protect their information. Join Bob and me next week for a webinar discussion, where we’ll cover our research findings and provide an overview of critical steps to achieving a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. Register today to join us on March 14 at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET. We look forward to speaking with you then, and thanks again for making HIMSS17 such an engaging event.
