THE SIEM AND THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY
The human race has always been concerned about health, and why not? In the last decade arose a great variety of wearable devices that let people monitor sleep data, heart rate, and step count. A small Hospital fastened to the wrist. The Healthcare industry also experimented with a big development.
I am not talking only about innovative treatments, advanced devices, and miraculous medicines. I am talking about the health information system (HIS), a system designed to manage the healthcare data, and operational management. These systems allow patients to access their health data such as appointment information, medications, and lab results over an internet connection.
Some patient portals allow active communication with their physicians, prescription refill requests, and the ability to schedule appointments. Adding the fact that anyone, from doctors to patients, can have access to the information, it is easy to realize why security is the leading Health Information System concern.
This valuable data becomes a primary target for hackers. In the US, cyber-criminals use the stolen personal health insurance information to obtain expensive medical services, devices, and prescription medications, as well as to acquire government benefits like Medicare or Medicaid fraudulently.
In some countries like the UK, the government protects the healthcare sector as a part of the critical national infrastructure, alongside the water, electricity, and transport networks. In Singapore, hackers breached the government’s health database accessing the data of 1.5 million patients.
However, according to international reports, information security remains a concern with only half or less of institutions performing to the expected level. Some healthcare institutions and providers don’t have enough budgets to invest in new IT systems, or the current IT architecture is obsolete, leaving them vulnerable.
SIEMs
In this environment, some security solutions are adjustable to any budget. The SIEM, Security Information and Event Management is an unreplaceable instrument to solve these problems in a cost-effective way. Breaches are expensive, and its flexibility makes them adaptable to any organization, no matter the size and resources, from a small clinic to a big Hospital.
A SIEM is very useful in preventing data breaches, even the threats coming from IoT (Internet of Things) devices being used in healthcare to control everything, from pacemakers to wearable location trackers for the elderly. This advanced security suite scans each infrastructure component using the Asset Discovery. This capability of seeing and assessing every device is critical to secure the entire network.
It applies security analytics to event data in real-time for the early detection of attacks and data breaches. Log Management collects, stores, analyzes, and reports on log data for incident response, forensics, and regulatory compliance. An IT security event is a change in normal operations. In the current cloud environment, thousands of events can be logged each day, and all of them may be non-threatening.
A SIEM uses a sophisticated UTM Real-time Threat Intelligence along with the Event Correlation to detect the real threats.
The SIEMs provide resources to help the healthcare institutions face the biggest challenges in that field successfully: The Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (i.e., HIPAA Privacy Rule) and The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009. But today, it’s not just the well-known HIPAA, there are now HITECH, PCI, and FRCP.
These security suites offer useful tools to achieve full compliance:
· Security automation and Firewall orchestration: It starts the automation of the alerts and defensive responses. It eliminates the need for additional IT staff.
· Unified Management Console: All security tools in one place, for better understanding and analysis of security events and alerts. Ideal for security experts and easy to understand for executives.
· Endpoint Detection and Response: It offers forensic capabilities to minimize the impact of a breach. Delivers full visibility throughout the endpoints, including networks, servers, databases, applications, processes, and communications to detect malicious activities and simplify the security incident response
· Compliance Reporting and Monitoring: It offers pre-defined reports that support compliance needs. This solution also offers IT security employees a broad and detailed vision into an organization’s security events, which can prevent HIPAA violations and keep health data safe.
· Cloud Monitoring: The most cost-effective solution for many healthcare providers is to take advantage of the cloud to store data. Institutions save health information on the cloud increasingly. A SIEM provides automated and manual tools for accomplishing, monitoring, and assessing the cloud structure.
The development of HIPAA compliant mobile apps frameworks, compliant storage, and HIPAA compliant web solutions means healthcare providers can take advantage of the benefits of new technology without exposing the privacy and security of patient data. There is a new standard for data security in the healthcare area that requires a higher level of protection.
There are many competitors in the SIEM Market such as Splunk, RSA, AlienVault, UTMStack, LogRhythm, and McAfee. They offer that kind of protection supplying an invaluable tool to protect ePHI, providing the ability to perceive all security events across an organization. Deploying a SIEM solution ensures to be compliant and avoid costly breaches to the organizations. To learn more about SIEMs, check this site:
This table shows the revenue generated by SIEM market for Healthcare segment between 2014–2019. Source: ResearchFox
The market growth of SIEM in healthcare is steady and will start gaining pace once, its implementation among healthcare companies in countries like India, and China starts increasing.
