5 Questions to Ask Before You Buy Another Healthcare System Cybersecurity Solution

With lives at stake and your brand reputation on the line, we know your critical systems must be up 24x7. How can you be sure your security investments are working as efficiently as possible to enable superior patient care, protect revenue, and mitigate reputational risk? A key part of success is avoiding the temptation to buy yet another standalone cybersecurity solution to address the latest issue.

Here are 5 questions you should be asking before you buy.

1. How does this solution add to or subtract from our overall observability profile?
Why It’s Important: To become a true contributor to system observability, a viable cybersecurity solution must offer comprehensive monitoring and identification of all system activities, real-time alerts and notifications, endpoint process visibility, packet-level network visibility, behavioral analytics, compliance and reporting features, and vulnerability management to identify and remediate security weaknesses in the infrastructure. In order to meet these criteria, it must be powered by packet-level visibility that goes deeper than simply analyzing metrics, logs, and traces. If your security solution stops short of packet-level analysis, your incident response teams won’t have the real-time and historical data they need to quickly investigate, analyze, and respond to security events so they can minimize their impact.

Next Steps: Make sure your staff gets into the most granular details of any cybersecurity solution so you don’t end up adding a standalone solution that could end up leaving gaps in your attack surface because it fails to deliver real-time and historical metadata about every threat. Also, remind them that packet data doesn’t have to be too expensive or unmanageable.

2. How does this solution help to make our entire network more secure?
Why It’s Important: Cybersecurity solutions should offer a multilayered (versus a narrow) array of benefits to be truly effective. These include the ability to monitor network traffic for suspicious activities and automatically respond to potential threats; continuously monitor endpoints for unusual behavior and provide detailed forensics for threat analysis; work with Identity and Access Management solutions to ensure that only authorized personnel can access sensitive systems and data; use network traffic analysis tools to monitor for anomalies and potential security threats; and conduct regular security audits to ensure compliance with healthcare regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. Finally, any solution must give your incident response teams distilled metadata about real-time and historical data derived from network packets. This will greatly accelerate your teams’ ability to investigate, analyze, and respond to security events so you minimize their impact.

Next Steps: Have your team evaluate solutions powered by conversational, packet-level network data. This is the best way to get to the root cause of threats and incidents faster, so your healthcare system can focus on delivering the highest-quality care.

3. How well does this solution cover our growing attack surface?
Why It’s Important: Because health system activities and acquisitions continue to expand their attack surfaces, a cybersecurity solution worth considering will allow you to implement multiple layers of defenses and controls that limit the opportunities for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities. These layers include the ability to maintain packet-level visibility into network traffic and identify anomalies in real-time, to monitor network traffic for suspicious activities and take action to prevent potential threats, to collect network forensic data necessary for root-cause analysis, and to aggregate logs from various network devices to a centralized logging system for analysis and correlation.

Next Steps: Ensure that any network security solution you investigate makes it harder for attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities within the network, and that all potential entry points are secured, monitored, and managed effectively. This will significantly reduce the risk of a successful cyber-attack. Again, this is not possible to achieve with solutions that only analyze network logs, metrics, and traces.

4. What kind of proactive powers does this solution offer in addition to its mitigation profile?
Why It’s Important: A good cybersecurity solution should offer proactive capabilities that help anticipate, identify, and mitigate potential threats before they cause significant harm. These proactive powers enhance overall security posture by allowing countermeasures to impact the threat outcome. In addition, a solution should employ AI/ML-driven models to predict potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities based on historical data and current trends and employ a global threat intelligence feed to keep you informed about emerging threats to healthcare networks and provide valuable insights to bolster your security strategy.

Next Steps: Carefully compare proactive capabilities of different cybersecurity solutions and ensure that the one you choose is purpose-fit for the unique requirements of a hospital network ecosystem.

5. How will this solution help us meaningfully reduce Mean Time to Information (MTTI) and Mean Time to Response (MTTR)?

Why It’s Important: Operations teams shouldn’t have to settle for a 5% improvement in MTTI or MTTR. Any solution you’re considering should generate rich, packet-derived metadata by watching applications across your network and adding that metadata to device management workflow information. This metadata can be used to rapidly triage the security of all system elements through traditional tools or via an AIOps platform, significantly reducing Mean Time to Information and Mean Time to Response. Fortunately, analysis at scale needn’t be cost-prohibitive or overwhelming in terms of data volume. The best solutions deliver a small subset of powerful metadata that operations teams can use in the moment.

Next Steps: Stress significant MTTI and MTTR improvements for any cybersecurity solution you may be considering to improve your health network’s security posture. And insist on exploring solutions that generate packet-derived metadata, since these solutions have been proven to shrink MTTI and MTTR from days to hours or minutes.

To get the expert healthcare support you need to navigate today’s toughest challenges, talk to a NETSCOUT expert or view more expert insights at: https://www.netscout.com/industries/healthcare.