Tallahassee Memorial Health might not have been disrupted in February, requiring systems downtime and patient inconvenience, had it deployed strong edge threat management technologies.
That’s according to Arista Networks, which pointed out that better edge threat management can help distributed enterprises keep data and devices secure against cyberattack.
The company referred readers to its case study, noting that taking “simple steps” can help industries stay ahead of evolving threats and hackers, and enhance their control over sensitive and confidential information.
“Ensure employees are only given access to the systems that they need. Patient information should be available based on pre-established, role-based privileges, ensuring that different roles within an organisation don’t have access to all the same information,” it said.
Software should be kept up to date to minimise the chance of vulnerability, and staff should be blocked from downloading riskier applications, minimising exposure to help protect the network – regardless of industry.
Separate backups of critical data should be kept in a separate location and refreshed regularly to ensure that data and configurations can be quickly restored. Staff devices should be kept on a separate network to that available to visitors to the organisation.
Arista also recommends the use of built-in threat intelligence engines for proactive protection against emerging cyberthreat, as well as advanced firewalling.
“Next-gen firewall solutions provide protection at the gateway in an all-in-one solution that encompasses advanced security features like virus blocking and threat prevention, and network optimisation and controls like web content and application filtering, bandwidth shaping, and WAN balancing,” the company said, pointing out that its own Edge Threat Management offerings roll up defences with monitoring and control for devices, applications and events.
“The healthcare industry has been under persistent attack by cybercriminals. Technology may have dramatically improved performance and effectiveness, yet these recent attacks have highlighted critical vulnerabilities,” Arista said.
Tallahassee Memorial Health, a healthcare organisation based in Florida, USA, was hit by a possible ransomware attack in February that took digital systems offline for two weeks.
