Healthcare

The healthcare industry has benefited from the breakneck pace of digitization—spanning everything from payments to patient records to X-ray film—but it has also been increasingly exposed to greater risk. Efforts to increase healthcare provider productivity via increased digitization and system interconnectivity have to be counterbalanced against the growing concerns for patient privacy and a backdrop of increasing liability.
In the wake of these concerns, a number of regulations have emerged for IT professionals in the healthcare industry to navigate. Beyond the standard set of IT security concerns that most IT departments must confront, many of the systems utilized in healthcare not only require special vulnerability management efforts but also fall under the auspices of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which complicates things further. Another pain point specific to the industry is the proliferation of embedded systems or medical devices that operate with their own unique set of security challenges.

TRADITIONAL SOLUTIONS ARE NO LONGER ACCURATE OR FAST ENOUGH

To manage these challenges, IT professionals in the healthcare industry turn to the typical array of security solutions used by their counterparts across other industries. Network intrusion prevention systems (IPS) are utilized to segment and defend the network. Patch management tools are used to roll out security patches.

Unfortunately, perimeter-oriented network IPS require ongoing operational resources, from constant tuning to the management of "noise" due to false alarms. New types of sophisticated attacks are also now evading them, creating a new category of "Zero Day" exploits that are mere mutations of the original attack against a known vulnerability.

THE SOLUTION: PROTECT UNTIL YOU CAN PATCH

Security patches may mitigate vulnerabilities but are resource intensive to install, require time to test and validate, and may introduce new availability risks and operational problems. There are also legacy and embedded systems for which no patches are issued. Too make patching even more challenging, many types of medical devices require vendor approval before patches can be applied.

Automated patching solutions typically focus on a few types of operating system and are used primarily for desktop protection. Yet health care data centers typically contain many different applications running on multiple operating systems. Deploying patches too quickly in such complex environments are high risk exercises that can also impact patient health. In addition, hasty reboots can also take critical systems out of service and introduce new operational complexity.

SERVERSHIELD IS ACCURATE, POWERFUL AND LOW MAINTENANCE

The award-winning Blue Lane ServerShield uses its unique, comprehensive protocol fluency to protect servers from sophisticated attacks without jeopardizing system availability, without false positives and without traffic disruption-based enforcement. The ServerShield appliance uses complete protocol decoding for hundreds of data center protocols, and corrects traffic heading to any known software vulnerability. The result: fast, accurate protection (without tuning) that lets your team deploy security patches on a sound schedule and with minimal risk.