Charles Edda & C. Bouley

Hackers will continue to go after networks, systems, and applications that have been misconfigured or are not maintained properly. Good cyber hygiene will become a common phrase to describe how organizations should approach managing the integrity of the enterprise. Organizations can be expected to look to improve their vulnerability management, increase the frequency of technical testing, add penetration testing, address long overlooked weaknesses in network segmentation and replace/refresh end-of-life platforms.

Successful organizations will be defined not by whether they have or haven’t had a cyber event, but rather by how well they manage the enterprise, are able to detect attackers, efficiently respond to events, and restore operations with minimal compromise or loss of IT assets and disruption.

Hospitals can prepare and manage such risks by viewing cybersecurity not as a novel issue but rather by making it part of the hospital’s existing governance, risk management and business continuity framework. Hospitals also will want to ensure that the approach they adopted remains flexible and resilient to address threats that are likely to be constantly evolving and multi-pronged.