How Does Application Modernization Strengthen Healthcare Cybersecurity?

Vendor Management

Third-party vendor management should also be part of a healthcare organization’s overall cybersecurity strategy, Rappl adds. Leveraging services from vendors is necessary for growth, she notes, but those partnerships carry their own risks.

“You’re expanding your risk footprint because you’re relying on third-party services to protect your data,” she says. “That’s why we have independent, third-party audits. We need to understand what their application development process looks like, where they’re storing the data and how they’re protecting it.”

Desired Application Modernization Outcomes for Healthcare

Health IT teams must keep usability in mind when upgrading their systems. “You can create the most secure application, but if it’s highly unusable, then people will find ways to circumvent the controls,” Stone says.

For example, he says, complicated password requirements can boost security, but only if used properly. “How many users will be able to adapt to that, especially in healthcare, where people are very busy and need to move quickly?”

Organizations should also consider visibility. Chaughtai recalls working with a healthcare organization that adopted a more modern platform after realizing that its outdated legacy system was unintentionally exposing data in certain areas. The old system had a rigid infrastructure that made updating it a slow and difficult process.

DISCOVER: An application modernization strategy creates a roadmap to better healthcare outcomes.

Through application modernization, the organization switched to a “plug and play” model, Chaughtai says. “Now they can change the security controls as needed, but the biggest benefit is greater visibility and compliance.” In the event of a data leak, IT teams can track when and where the data has been accessed.

In addition, Stone says, it’s important to build resilient architecture so that an organization can recover quickly in the case of a breach. He notes that Pure Storage’s SafeMode Snapshots  creates copies of valuable data sets that cannot be deleted by bad actors.

As cybercriminals continue to use more sophisticated tools to target healthcare systems, Chaughtai says, using application modernization in tandem with cybersecurity will have long-term benefits. “We need to consider the cost of data breaches holistically,” he says. “There are financial aspects and a loss of productivity, but also a loss of confidence from the patient perspective. That damage can last a long time.”