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Friday Quick Take: Taking Healthcare Cybersecurity Beyond Compliance

Compliance is a term that grabs the attention of almost any healthcare security professional. After all, healthcare is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world. The HIPPA fines alone for non-compliance can cost an organization $1.5 million a year.

Given the consequences of non-compliance and the effort required to get and stay compliant, meeting compliance surely means that you’re also secure, right? We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but compliance and security are not synonymous. While being compliant can certainly knock out several security measures critical to your security infrastructure (and vice versa), it isn’t enough for your overall security program to simply meet compliance standards.

What’s the most practical approach to the compliance and security conundrum?

Implementing a program to meet both can solve a myriad of problems. That’s where the power of identity comes in. We don’t need to look much further than our one of own customers, Molina Healthcare, to see this process in action. Molina Healthcare came to us with the need to meet security and compliance requirements, while also providing convenient access for more than 20,000 users.

After deploying SailPoint, Molina Healthcare gained visibility into who has access to what data, was able to locate and classify HIPPA-sensitive data, achieved streamlined access requests and can monitor user activity in real time just to name a few tangible results.

Further, their story demonstrates how influential the large volumes of users are in keeping the organization’s sensitive data safe. While it might seem like healthcare cybersecurity should place a heavy focus on keeping out malicious outsiders looking to gain access to valuable personal data, some of the most significant threats come from within the organization’s four walls. In fact, more than half of all healthcare breaches are caused by insiders, whether malicious or caused by accident.

With a robust identity governance program, healthcare organizations don’t have to make a choice between being compliant and secure. Instead, they solve the problems they’re facing in their compliance, business and security initiatives with one solution. Most importantly, they can focus on serving their patients and customers without the fear of their sensitive information getting into the wrong hands. And that, as we often say, is the power of identity.

Healthcare organizations looking to meet compliance while also shoring up their security can learn more about how the power of identity can empower your organization in Why Compliance is Insufficient for Healthcare Cybersecurity.


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