Many healthcare security leaders know their organization has hidden vulnerabilities that could be exploited any day now – but they lack the resources to efficiently deal with those threats. That is why cyber risk remediation solutions are so important to ensure you avert crisis and keep your patients and reputation safe.
This article explores how risk remediation tools help overworked security teams overcome their resource limitations and scale remediation efficiently. It not only provides a clear overview of the benefits these products provide, but it also offers a guide to help you assess and select the perfect tool for your specific organization.
Why Risk Remediation Is Vital for Healthcare
The healthcare industry not only faces a higher volume of cyberattacks than any other industry – it also lags other industries in efforts to mitigate and eliminate risks. The average healthcare organization faces both high levels of cybercrime and serious data security challenges yet allocates just 9% of IT budgets to security.
This has made risk remediation an urgent priority for most organizations, with security teams desperately pushing for more resources to tackle a range of challenges, including:
- Legacy Systems: Healthcare IT ecosystems routinely include outdated devices or software that presents an easy “way in” for attackers.
- Vendor Networks: The average healthcare IT system is connected in various ways to over 1,300 third-party vendors, creating a remarkably wide attack surface.
- Regulatory Scrutiny: The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is increasing enforcement of non-compliance penalties, including large financial fines and even potential jail time.
The net result? A large majority of organizations face serious repercussions if they don’t undertake significant remediation efforts in the coming months – which has created an extraordinary demand for products to support those efforts.
Tools and Technologies to Streamline Risk Remediation
The market for risk remediation products is expected to be worth over $5.7 billion within a decade, growing at 16.2% annually. However, there is a wide range of solutions your security team could benefit from when approaching remediation.
We can sort them into three broad categories:
- Risk Remediation Products: These are solutions specifically designed to make the remediation process easier, faster, and/or more cost effective. For example, security patches target specific weaknesses or bugs within IT systems and therefore make it easier to remediate risk.
- Cybersecurity Tools: This is a large category of cybersecurity solutions which support remediation but also offer a range of other benefits – such as monitoring compliance with HIPAA requirements or improved risk visibility.
- Remediation Services: These are services designed to support remediation, such as risk prioritization and remediation planning – as well as help selecting and integrating the right technology to improve your cybersecurity posture.
These solutions help you protect your systems, data, and networks by detecting potential threats, applying fixes (such as patches), and enforcing security measures to reduce the likelihood of exploitation. They can also help ensure compliance with HIPAA, HITRUST, NIST CSF and other frameworks to boost your overall security posture.
But what exactly should you be looking for in such solutions?
3 Key Benefits to Look for in a Cybersecurity Remediation Solution
There are three powerful benefits the best remediation solutions offer:
1. Enhanced Security Assessments
Most healthcare IT ecosystems are vast and complex, requiring frequent and thorough assessments. Fortunately, implementing risk remediation technology can simplify these processes, reducing complexity and alleviating ‘assessment fatigue’ for your teams through:
- Automation: Many tools automate key tasks within the assessment process, such as the creation of up-to-date surveys or communicating with third-party delegates. This lightens the assessment workload and standardizes the process.
- Data Centralization: Some tools streamline assessment data and create a single unified source of risk information. This makes storing and analyzing assessment results far less taxing and saves many hours of effort.
2. Improved Prioritization
The goal of remediation is to reduce the risk of a cyberattack or compliance breach. Accurately ranking the urgency of vulnerabilities helps you allocate time and resources to the most immediate threats – and maximize the efficacy of your remediation program.
Many tools augment or accelerate this process by enabling your team to compare multiple risks simultaneously. Security leaders often struggle to make objective decisions because their risk data is spread across multiple systems – and it becomes very difficult to score or compare vulnerabilities.
A centralized view of organization-wide vulnerabilities allows you to make more objective decisions, putting each threat in proper context – so that your team is not accidentally overlooking less easily visible problems.
3. Automated Remediation Planning
Fixing vulnerabilities within a healthcare IT system can take weeks or months, depending on the specific issue being addressed. This requires a comprehensive plan, which many security teams find time-consuming and complicated to construct.
Some products eliminate this hurdle and produce automated remediation plans. With enough information about the nature and risk level of their vulnerabilities, you can quickly produce tailored plans to resolve the threat in a time and cost-efficient manner that allows them to get started faster – and eliminate the vulnerability before it is exploited.
3 Factors to Consider When Assessing a Risk Remediation Solution
From getting executive buy-in to accessing adequate budget, your path to purchase will likely be challenging. Healthcare organizations often still undervalue cybersecurity, and leaders must be confident their investment is worthwhile. That makes it essential that you choose the right solutions that are easiest to “sell” to the board.
Here are three essential factors that will help simplify and improve your selection process:
1. User Experience
Remediation products exist to augment – not replace – your security team. As a result, the tool must be easy to use across multiple dimensions:
- Integration: The tool should seamlessly integrate into your existing tech stack with minimal manual effort
- User Interface: The tool should present information in a clear and intuitive way that reduces ambiguity and confusion
- Support: The tool should be supplemented by expert support that is available and responsive
What to Ask: How quickly and easily can my team start using this tool?
What to Expect: Look for remediation products that have foregrounded user experience and understand how healthcare security teams actually operate today.
2. Stack Complexity
Many remediation products are highly specialized and serve a single purpose within your security program. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, introducing ten different tools can overwhelm your team and create a lot of confusion and waste. Equally, many of these products will not be healthcare-focused – meaning they are less well matched to your specific needs.
What to Ask: How many tools of this kind will I need – and how complicated will managing them simultaneously become? Do the vendors specialize in healthcare cybersecurity?
What to Expect: Look for tools that integrate multiple features or single vendors that can deliver a suite of products to meet your various remediation needs.
3. Interoperability
Data fragmentation and silos are among the most pervasive factors that hold back remediation efforts. However, given the sensitivity and complexity of healthcare data systems, many new products will create data interoperability challenges – and make it harder to implement a unified and efficient remediation program.
What to Ask: Can this tool share data with my other tools – and how easy is it to track the flow of that data?
What to Expect: Look for tools that have built-in compliance and make interoperability seamless.
Integrated Risk Management: The Perfect Solution
The factors explored above point to a simple fact: risk remediation is often stunted not just by resource limitations or a lack of c-suite buy-in, but also by a lack of cohesion within the remediation strategy and tech stack.
That is why integrated risk management (IRM) has grown in popularity in recent years. A unified approach that looks to centralize data, streamline technology, and introduce a cohesive strategy that covers all areas of risk dramatically simplifies, accelerates, and improves remediation.
Intraprise Health has built an entire suite of interoperable risk remediation products and expert services around this concept, helping to take the pressure off your team and address vulnerabilities quicker. Our end-to-end remediation solution features:
- Centralized Data: Build a unified view of your risk landscape and prioritize organization-wide risk more accurately and easily
- Enhanced Security: Improve your posture to earn HITRUST certification and ensure you have best-in-class security
- Complete Support: From remediation program management to policy, procedure, and documentation, our expert team makes remediation smoother at every stage
Want to explore how it could help you address your hidden security weaknesses?
