Endpoint Security: The Key To Digital Healthcare Security

Since the release of Apple’s original iPhone in 2007, the use of mobile devices has grown tremendously. According to Pew Research Center, 90% of all adults in the U.S. owned a cell phone as of January 2014. A full 29% of people who responded on the topic indicated that they saw their mobile devices as something that they couldn’t imagine living without.

Increase consumer demand for mobile services has pushed the devices to evolve at a staggering rate causing a rapid shift in how we experience data on the go. This massive cultural and technological movement has had an incredibly positive impact on the healthcare industry.

With greater connectivity enabled by devices, primary care physicians can access patient data at any time virtually anywhere in the world. Whether they are in the office, at home or traveling. In many ways mobile technologies empower healthcare practitioners through speed, convenience and reliability.

While mobile devices have undoubtedly made a positive impact on healthcare, they also represent a very serious security concern that cannot be ignored.

The Mobile Phone Conundrum

According to a study conducted by IDC, healthcare professionals interact with an average of six different mobile devices on a daily basis. Healthcare professionals rely on the convenience greater network reach offers and it improves the quality of care by improving productivity. But these helpful and resourceful new ways of working introduce new challenges for digital security. Every device at some point connects to a healthcare facility’s internal network. Every time a new device connects to that network, it represents a new potential vulnerability that can be exploited by hackers.

Case in point: if you purchased a new desktop computer for your office, one of the first things that you would do is make sure that it is as secure as possible. You would install antivirus and anti malware software and you would make sure that it could not become a security liability in any way. This is an important process that is typically handled by an IT professional for the sake of consistency and accuracy. With mobile devices, the same level of caution is not yet exercised in healthcare organizations with dangerous consequences.

When you consider that most employees also connect to the same network with smartphones and tablets, you realize just how complex the security issue truly is. The desktop computer in your office is fixed and easier to supervise. However, a doctor can easily lose their device while on vacation, meaning that sensitive patient records are vulnerable.

Addressing Endpoint Security

As with most security related issues, the solution to endpoint security requires careful planning. For example, IT professionals need the ability to remotely lock a device that was lost to ensure patient data is secure. If a doctor’s lost cell phone cannot be physically recovered, it needs to be securely wiped from a third party location to prevent patient records from being exposed.

For mobile devices that connect to the healthcare facility’s network on a regular basis, logging device users and their actions is also a necessity. IT professionals need to validate users on the network at any given time, identify the device they’re using, pinpoint the files they access and more to remain secure. In the event that a security breach is discovered, this information will be invaluable for determining the cause and preventative measures for the future.

An important endpoint security basic is creating policies that govern the ways these devices can be used. For example, the standard security features that come enabled on an employees iPhone by default may be enough to protect a casual user’s information, but they will not be able to successfully protect a healthcare environment from the types of complex threats that they face on a daily basis.

Another important protocol for employees bringing a personal mobile device onto a healthcare network involves app encryption that is then monitored and enforced by IT professionals at all times. Encryption essentially takes electronic information and scrambles it in such a way to make sure that it cannot be properly read without an associated encryption key.

Passwords

Another crucial step to take to guarantee endpoint security involves an enforcement of device level passwords across the organization. It is always important to remember that not all passwords are created equally. It would take the right computer program just a few seconds to crack shorter passwords that are only made up of common words or phrases. At that point, having a weak password is essentially the same thing as not having a password at all.

For the purposes of security, a healthcare organization needs to implement a policy of secure, unique passwords for mobile devices that are a combination of not only numbers and letters, but of special symbols at the same time. These passwords should be no shorter than 12 characters in length for the best possible results.

For the best results, passwords should not be words or phrases at all. Using something like “23&((&*@)$%” as a password would be ideal, because it would both be incredible difficult for someone to guess and it would be equally hard for a computer program to calculate. It may be more difficult to remember that type of password versus the name of your favorite elementary school teacher or the type of car that you drove in college, but that inconvenience is a small price to pay for the level of security that you’ll now be able to guarantee.

These simple steps can help prevent issues relating to endpoint security in your healthcare organization. Though endpoint security is one of the keys to keeping your patients and employees safe from digital threats, it is not the only step that you need to take in order to insure maximum protection at all times. Data security like encryption techniques, making use of security intelligence solutions and creating a culture of security across your organization are all mandatory to help keep the important medical records that you’re working with on a daily basis away from prying eyes.

More Information

If you’d like to learn more about healthcare security, current industry trends, statistics, best practices and more to keep your organization safe, download our free ebook, 5 Significant Healthcare Data Breaches and How They Could Have Been Avoided.