Every Healthcare Delivery Organization (HDO) relies on trusted teams to secure their Extended Internet of Things (XIoT). The challenge for HDOs is that threats to their healthcare devices and complex systems are increasing exponentially. As new life-sustaining and life-supporting medical devices are connected to the healthcare environment, new attack vectors have also emerged. And, as HDOs undergo digital transformation, security teams have been left with the validated concern that their connected devices will become an easy target for bad actors. To alleviate this, many seek a trusted device security partner to help them effectively define and manage cyber-physical risk strategies.
At Claroty, we believe that HDOs deserve an environment where cyber and physical worlds connect safely. Sharing the concerns of HDOs world-wide, we built our Partner Ready Operational Services (PROS) to confidently empower you to lower your cyber risk. When customers engage with us, they typically seek an improved outcome for some area of their existing cybersecurity practice. Although HDOs have teamed up with Claroty and PROS-certified service partners to address various different cybersecurity challenges, there are some common themes that we have observed. Based on these observations, we have compiled the top reasons organizations choose to engage with a device security partner when rolling out their medical device security programs:
1. Program Management
Sometimes, the best way to manage a security tool is to find experts and let them do it! We have seen this approach from security teams with lots of staff and those lean and mean organizations. Each organization will have different reasons for asking a partner to manage their Medigate instance on a day-to-day basis. Still, some expected benefits include negotiated SLAs, remediation support, and advanced recommendations.
2. Unique Skill Set Needed
Often, an organization will encounter a challenge that requires a specific skill-set or certification. The cost to hire a person to fill a role on their team may be high, and finding a person with a unique existing skill set can be hard. Partnering with a PROS-certified partner that employs someone who can do the job is a cost-effective way to solve this challenge. Finding the right people will require thorough interviewing, evaluating their past work, and reference checks, similar to the pathway of hiring an employee. But this work will be contract-bound, and once the problem is solved, the person will be ‘off your payroll.’
2. Security Tool Integrations
Your technology stack is only as good as the integrations that define it, and qualifying the value of integrations and implementing it is not the same. This disconnect is evident with new and emerging technologies, as existing security teams especially may not have experience with integrating them into the overall healthcare organization. A PROS-certified partner will have a multi-disciplined approach to your security stack, as well as where it may be valuable to loop in other stakeholders across your health system, such as clinical engineering, procurement, or legal teams. A trusted partner will be able to currently incorporate disconnected tools and help your whole stack perform better.
3. Accelerated Value
With the experience of working with many HDOs, PROS-certified partners can bring a wealth of practical knowledge to a client. Many times, customer challenges have been solved previously by a PROS-certified partner in other HDOs. This expertise speeds up the time to value from the engagement and allows for fewer mistakes in the process. Another benefit is the collaboration and knowledge transfer between the customer and PROS-certified partner teams. The certified partner may have deep subject matter expertise in an area or know how to properly use data derived from a tool, like the Medigate Platform, to solve common customer challenges or blind spots within a healthcare environment.
4. Economies of Scale
IT and security budgets are not growing at a rate commensurate with the challenges related to managing risk. You can be confident that trained and certified partners operate far more efficiently and are experts at identifying gaps and upskilling staff for the long haul. While the cost of bringing in full-time expert employees might be too high for your existing budget, the need to have the skill remains. Partnering with a third party allows you to leverage their expertise at a fraction of the cost.
So, there you have it — some of the more common reasons customers have trusted Medigate and our PROS-certified partners. Although your specific challenges may not be reflected in the above list, we can help you with almost anything regarding your clinical device security. PROS was designed to ensure comprehensive security across all critical assets, including the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), operational technology (OT), and enterprise IoT – or the XIoT. By teaming up with a trusted device security partner, you can ensure risk reduction with a programmatic, cross-departmental approach to security.
