If cybersecurity is keeping you up at night, you wouldn’t be alone. 

Rarely does a week go by without a news story about another cyberbreach at a hospital or health system. The devastating February attack on Change Healthcare, which reverberated deeply throughout the healthcare industry and continues to leave many organizations reeling from the aftermath, was just one in a long line of breaches. No doubt there will be many more to come. 

Cyber criminals have been ramping up their game for some time. As attacks increase, healthcare organizations remain among the most vulnerable targets, given their complexity, the treasure trove of personal information they store, and the patient lives that could be at stake should vital services and equipment be taken offline. When it comes to protecting healthcare organizations from cyber threats, the old ways of assessing risk are just not cutting it. 

It's not from lack of trying. Today’s healthcare organizations are spending more money than ever on their IT budgets, investing in human and technology resources to keep threats at bay. Unfortunately, threat actors are upping their game, too, aided by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. These technologies allow them to cover more ground faster before most organizations even know there is a breach. 

Even with investments in cybersecurity tools, the cyber threat landscape is evolving so rapidly that many of the traditional cybersecurity risk assessment methods, such as sampling and interviews, are not enough to protect your organization. You need a different approach to IT and cyber risk management. You need strategies and technologies designed to help your organization find threats quicker, more effectively, and at a lower cost. 

Yet amidst this turmoil there are three ways to amplify your cybersecurity risk assessment and begin future-proofing your organization for whatever cyberthreats might be around the corner. 

1. Use complete datasets 

Traditional cybersecurity methods have long relied on limited, manual sampling to assess risk. But to assess cyber risk in today’s climate, full dataset analysis is much more effective.

Kodiak’s cybersecurity risk measurement system, for example, replaces manual, time-consuming methods with an evidence-based analysis of your environment. Using comprehensive datasets versus small samples provides fuller IT risk coverage, and healthcare organizations can perform them much faster than traditional audit methods. Using all your data allows you to better identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities and control deficiencies, helping internal auditors identify and mitigate your organization’s risk. 

2. Embrace AI 

Cybercriminals are using AI to widen the scope of their attacks. Your organization can use AI to stop them—or at least slow them down. 

Advanced AI solutions can assess your organization’s cybersecurity performance quickly and comprehensively and measure it against the most common IT and cybersecurity frameworks, including those from organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, HITRUST, the Center for Internet Security, and the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program. 

Using AI can help internal audit staff generate details about your organization’s cybersecurity environment and ideas for mitigating cyber risk. This, in turn, can ease IT staff burnout by reducing manual work. 

3. Continuously monitor for risk 

Because bad actors are leaning on AI, machine learning, and related technologies to breach organizations’ environments in some cases in a matter of hours, businesses need to catch potential breaches faster. Unfortunately, it takes businesses an average of 258 days to find a breach in their environment. 

To stay ahead of the bad actors, you must increase your organization’s cybersecurity risk monitoring. Many organizations using Kodiak’s IT and cyber methodology for assessing cybersecurity risk are measuring their cybersecurity performance daily. Depending on your organization’s needs, you can measure more or less frequently to stay ahead of threats. Consider taking advantage of continuous monitoring capabilities, such as automated solutions that can run 24/7 to identify threats in real time, saving IT staff time and bandwidth to focus on other important work. 

How else can we help you with cybersecurity? 

In a fast-moving cyber threat landscape, you need ways to adapt and address threats proactively. Don’t be overwhelmed by mitigating cyberthreats in an increasingly hostile environment. 

These are just three thoughts on how your organization can boost its cybersecurity. Kodiak has myriad cybersecurity strategies and technologies to help reduce your IT staff’s burden and mitigate threats so you can focus on what’s most important—taking care of your patients. 

Contact Kodiak’s cybersecurity experts today to learn how we can help you proactively address cybersecurity and reduce your organization’s risk.