The healthcare industry has gone through a major digital transformation. From electronic patient records to online consultancy, a lot has changed in the healthcare industry. With accelerating digitization in the healthcare industry, cybersecurity risks are more powerful than ever. Every hospital is now searching for a reliable healthcare cybersecurity risk management technology. Recently, many healthcare organizations have started using AI-led solutions for security & compliance. AIOps is making waves in the healthcare industry for its role in preventing cyberattacks. Continue reading to know how cybersecurity can be boosted in healthcare with AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations).

Challenges with cybersecurity in healthcare

Gone are the days when healthcare organizations used paper documents for storing information. At present, the healthcare industry is adopting digital transformation strategies. As healthcare goes digital, cybersecurity threats knock on the door. Your IT network opens the door to many cyber-attacks like phishing attacks, DOS attacks, and selective forging. The taxonomy of cyber-attacks is increasing regularly, and healthcare entities are finding them challenging. With an outdated technology stack, healthcare organizations are unprepared when it comes to detecting and eliminating cybersecurity threats.

Age-old healthcare-managed security services cannot handle the complexity of sophisticated cyber-attacks. It is why the healthcare industry is counting on new-age technologies to safeguard its IT infrastructure. AI/ML has played a major role in addressing the challenges of modern-day cyberattacks. Some of the challenges faced by the healthcare industry in preventing cyberattacks are as follows:

• The amount of data in the healthcare industry has significantly increased in recent years. Patient data (PHI) is now being stored digitally. A healthcare organization collects data from several sources. However, it is challenging to bring healthcare data from different sources together. The basic principle of cybersecurity is that one should have a unified view of the organizational data. Healthcare organizations find it challenging to break down silos in their IT infrastructure and bring the data together.
• Every healthcare organization has access to sensitive information about patients. Even a private practitioner stores patient information on digital channels. These electronic health records need to be safeguarded from getting into the wrong hands. Not to forget, healthcare entities are bound with many compliance norms and must protect sensitive information at any cost. Security & compliance are the biggest challenges for the healthcare industry in 2022.
• What good can a hospital do when a cyberattack has disrupted its healthcare service offerings. At present, the healthcare industry is facing hassles in identifying a cyberattack before it has occurred. With age-old monitoring systems, proactive threat detection is impossible considering the sophistication level of modern-day cyberattacks.
• Authorization management is a challenge for the healthcare industry in 2022. Electronic patient records are accessed by employees, patients, representatives, insurance companies, and many others. How to make sure that an authorized person is accessing digital health records? Identity and authorization management becomes complex when people from different geographical locations are accessing their patient records.
• Healthcare cybersecurity risk management technology should identify high-risk incidents. Innumerable incidents occur regularly and, an organization needs to work on the high-risk incidents first. Age-old analytics platforms cannot help healthcare organizations with event prioritization.

As you can see, there are several cybersecurity challenges in front of healthcare organizations. The use of artificial intelligence in healthcare has started to address these challenges. Many healthcare organizations have already boosted their service availability with the help of AIOps. Let us see the role of AIOps in addressing these cybersecurity challenges.

AIOps for cybersecurity

AIOps-based cybersecurity solutions can provide real-time alerts for security breaches. Security & compliance are boosted with AIOps while requiring minimal human intervention. How AIOps boosts cybersecurity in healthcare is as follows:

Rich observability into healthcare IT infrastructure

A large healthcare organization has many dedicated software systems to ensure cybersecurity. The real challenge is to monitor the performance of those software systems responsible for cybersecurity. If any cybersecurity system goes down, the service availability of a healthcare organization can be disrupted. AIOps can help you know more about your crucial software systems responsible for cybersecurity. You gain observability into your IT infrastructure with an AIOps-led cybersecurity solution.

Single pane of glass solution for the healthcare industry

Breaking data silos is the demand of the hour for the healthcare industry. You need user activity data to make sure an authorized patient is accessing electronic health records. You need infrastructural data to find any anomaly in the performance of software systems. Similarly, you need incident data to monitor the IT incidents that can be a threat to your organization. An AIOps based analytics platform can bring all types of healthcare data together. With a single pane of glass view, healthcare organizations can gain control of their cybersecurity processes.

Incident prioritization in the healthcare industry

Every large healthcare organization has a dedicated IT infrastructure. As new digital transformation services and solutions arrive, the IT infrastructure becomes more complex. Traditional monitoring systems may generate thousands of IT alerts in a single day. Sometimes multiple alerts can be generated for the same cybersecurity threat. For example, your cybersecurity solution may generate two alerts for a single unauthorized entry point in your digital health records. How do healthcare organizations identify redundant security alerts?

Even if you identify redundant security alerts, you must prioritize the alerts based on their effects. AIOps based analytics platforms can prioritize the security alerts based on their impact on the healthcare organization. Consider a scenario where a DOS attack is preventing your doctors from accessing patient details. At the same time, an unauthorized entry is detected on your organization’s website. In such a scenario, you need to solve the DOS attacks first to increase service availability.

Besides the benefits mentioned, AIOps can also help you with intelligent threat detection, automation in cybersecurity, identity management, and performance degradation detection. In recent years, many healthcare organizations have used AIOps for security & compliance. With AIOps, you can eliminate cyber threats proactively with minimal human intervention. Also, your IT infrastructure will become more resilient in this era of sophisticated cyberattacks. Start using AIOps for security & compliance in healthcare!