HITSecurity Forum

Richard Staynings, HIMSS Privacy & Security Committee. Photo: Tina Kitchen.

‘Security is an industry where we are continually developing new solutions without understanding the problem we are trying to fix’.

This was the basis for a presentation I gave to the HIMSS Healthcare Security Forum today in Boston.

Richard Staynings presents new security technologies. Photo: Malissa O'Rourke Miot.

The session discussed the adoption of new and emerging tools and approaches to secure healthcare data and IT system availability. Tools like NGFW, Micro-Segmentation, Biometrics and MFA, Blockchain, Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning and AI. Tools that boost automation, protection, visibility, and intelligence, leading to improved threat detection, and containment of inevitable attacks.

Richard Staynings discusses new security tools. Photo: Tina Kitchen.

As with any new tool or approach, security leaders need to fully understand the costs, benefits and drawbacks before adoption, and how quickly, easily or difficult each tool can be integrated into the existing infrastructure. Furthermore, they need to be able to articulate and defend exactly what business risk gaps, each tool will address, what business benefits it will provide to the organization and what legacy tools it will retire.

As security leaders, we need to work smarter, not harder, and with an average 65 disparate security vendors in each US hospital, we need to consolidate to a smaller, leaner and more manageable toolbox.

Photo: Tina Kitchen.

Thanks to the attendees, sponsors and organizers of the HIMSS Media Healthcare Security Forum today in Boston.

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