Understanding Zero Trust Is Essential to Healthcare Success
As they engage in efforts to implement a zero-trust approach, healthcare organizations and their IT teams must understand that it is a process, not a destination. The steps an organization takes toward zero trust will evolve as numerous factors change, including the organization’s business needs, the threats it faces and the security solutions it uses.
“There are a lot of great solutions that can help,” says CDW Chief Security Technologist Jeremiah Salzberg. “But it’s important to remember that zero trust is more of an architectural strategy than a specific product or technology.”
The benefits of zero trust extend beyond an improved security posture, says Jeremy Weiss, an executive security strategist with CDW. Implementing zero-trust principles can help healthcare organizations reduce their technical debt and build more efficient operational processes. Because the approach employs network segmentation, application developers can operate securely at a quicker pace than they could otherwise.
The process of implementing zero trust also provides much clearer visibility into an IT environment than most healthcare organizations have, Salzberg says.
Health IT teams are better able to see dependencies between different systems and applications and understand how they communicate and interact. “We’ve seen some improvements in overall stability and efficiency in environments where they’ve gone to a zero-trust architecture,” Salzberg says.
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