With so many clinical and non-clinical devices connected to your healthcare organization’s network, any threat can disrupt patient care and introduce risk to the care environment. Protecting the cyber-physical systems (CPS) on your network that your care team depends on day in and day out can be accomplished through strategic and tailored network protection measures.
Understanding the importance of network protection for healthcare, how to overcome common challenges, and the critical phases to implement network segmentation practices and policies can set your organization up to better protect your devices, network, and patients.
What is Network Protection?
Network protection encompasses a series of strategies, policies, and compensating controls to protect your organization’s network from cyber threats. For example, in the case of a breach, implementing a Zero Trust Architecture that assumes no implicit trust can help to limit the damage and impact of such incident. Methods like network segmentation that groups devices together to create smaller subnetworks allows network administrators to control traffic flow and communications from one device to another based on certain policies.
At its foundation, network segmentation is understanding device communication patterns and typical network traffic. With this baseline established, abnormal communications or deviations in traffic can alert your organization to potential cyber threats.
The Importance of Network Protection in Healthcare
Patient safety is the highest priority when selecting cybersecurity controls in healthcare. Protecting patients from risk involves ensuring that medical devices connected to the network are safeguarded from attacks and that the networks supporting these devices remain secure and resilient. A compromised network or unavailable devices can directly impact patient care, leading to delays or disruptions in critical treatments. Ultimately, the failure to secure these systems can increase the likelihood of adverse outcomes, including higher rates of morbidity and mortality. Robust cybersecurity measures are essential to maintaining patient trust, continuity of care, and life-saving outcomes.
As with every healthcare cybersecurity measure, risk reduction for patients is the underlying reason for adopting network protection measures. Consider the risk to clinical and non-clinical workflows if an incident were to occur. Ensuring that devices are only communicating the minimal amount necessary can keep them from disrupting these workflows, and by extension, patient care. By taking steps to shrink the attack surface and minimize opportunities for cyber threats, your organization can keep care delivery safe and effective for patients, even in the event of a network compromise.
Additionally, these steps can help you manage end of life (EOL) devices and mitigate the risks for these and other “unpatchable” devices that may be in your environment. In addition to risk reduction in EOL devices, these proactive measures can help a healthcare organization save money by facilitating better replacement purchases of EOL devices by extending their lifespan.
Finally, organizations need to consider regulatory compliance and industry standards when adopting new cybersecurity measures, but especially as new proposals are made to update regulations. A proposal to update a HIPAA security rule directly references the necessity of healthcare organizations to produce network mapping and demonstrate records of which devices are in communication on their network. As the federal government’s recognition of the importance of network mapping and understanding device communications demonstrates, these strategies are the healthcare industry’s best practices for network protection. Adopting these strategies will offer enhanced security to your network today and may be required for regulatory compliance in the near future.
Challenges of Implementing Network Protection
Once an organization has awareness of network protection as a best practice for healthcare cybersecurity, identifying the need for segmentation is only the first step on the cybersecurity maturity journey. With several challenges to overcome, it’s important to understand the many phases of the network protection process in order to take action.
One of the most important, and overlooked, factors in a successful network segmentation strategy is having a complete asset inventory. Without granular device data and a network map of every connected CPS device and their communications, it’s impossible to create effective network segmentation policies.
Due to the unique nature of healthcare and care delivery environments, the inability to generate and maintain a complete asset inventory has been the primary stumbling block to network segmentation efforts. Because CPS, particularly medical devices, often have proprietary protocols, profiling and monitoring device communications can present a challenge. Only discovery methods that are purpose-built to discover devices with these unique communication patterns can offer complete asset visibility with insights into device communications and network traffic.
Navigating the Journey to Healthcare Network Protection
Achieving network protection in a healthcare environment is a journey with several phases that begins first and foremost with asset discovery. Once a complete asset inventory has been achieved, it’s possible to start on the first phase of network segmentation.
Phase 1: Define Segmentation Strategy
As you begin to implement network segmentation measures, you must first define the strategy by taking into account the objectives of your healthcare organization, compliance requirements, and device insights. Setting goals as you map out your strategy ensures the next steps you take will actually achieve the results you’re looking for and help you to enforce the measures across your organization.
Phase 2: Create Groups and Policies
Properly segmenting requires your organization to evaluate device communications, operations, and criticality in order to group them together. Once this is completed, you must create policies tailored to each group to define how those devices should communicate under normal circumstances. This helps to define a baseline for device communications.
Phase 3: Monitor Policies
With the groups and policies in place, the next phase is monitoring all clinical devices and their communications. Part of this phase includes configuring alerting rules. If any deviations from these rules are detected, your team will be automatically alerted.
Phase 4: Investigate, Tune, and Validate
When deviations in communications do occur, it’s necessary to investigate them and identify ones that require actions. Remediations for the riskiest devices should be prioritized. Tuning and validating the policies ensure that with proper enforcement, these devices should not negatively impact clinical workflows.
Phase 5: Enforce and Optimize Policies
The final phase involves importing and enforcing identity and policies through your existing NAC or firewall solutions. This step in segmentation allows you to scale enforcement across all sites and increase granularity over time with the goal of strengthening your policies and protection.
Put Network Protection into Action with Claroty
Healthcare systems looking to reduce risk for patients, comply with regulations and industry standards, and protect clinical and non-clinical workflows from disruption should implement network protection measures tailored to their organization’s unique needs. By overcoming the typical challenges associated with network segmentation and following the five phases of adopting these policies, healthcare organizations can secure their CPS and protect patient care.
Claroty xDome for healthcare’s asset inventory and network protection capabilities equip your healthcare organization with the solutions you need to properly segment your network, monitor device communications, and optimize your organization’s policies.
To learn more about how Claroty xDome’s approach to network protection could help your organization reduce risk, speak with a member of our team today.
