What to Consider When Protecting Healthcare Data
Data protection is critical in healthcare. Hospitals, clinics, urgent care centers, medical offices, insurance providers, billing services providers, and other organizations face a dual responsibility: first and foremost, they must safeguard the privacy, identity, security, and finances of their patients. No less important, they must also protect their own organization from costly breaches, regulatory fines, and damage to their business, reputation, and patient relationships.
Seeking to secure the sensitive data they hold and work with, healthcare organizations increasingly use encryption to protect data in transit. While effective as far as it goes, this approach can lead to a false sense of security—as organizations fail to realize that encryption can also be used to hide attacks. Rendered invisible to their own security devices, malware and viruses can then pass easily into the organization’s environment alongside other types of encrypted traffic.
Recognizing this problem, some organizations turn to decryption as a way to effectively inspect all the traffic leaving and entering their environment. In practice, though, decryption is typically implemented in a highly inefficient, ad hoc manner that quickly raises issues with cost, scalability, and performance. The organization faces a hard choice between security and efficiency.
In this ebook, we’ll talk about the security threats facing healthcare organizations, the issues with traditional approaches to encryption and decryption, and a better way to protect data privacy without impairing security.
