Healthcare has adopted a distributed technology model, increasing access for patients, trial participants, medical providers, and researchers. Telehealth, remote monitoring, and decentralized clinical trials are becoming commonplace, aided by the speed and scale of cloud computing and modern applications. This growth has led to an increase in multicloud adoption, with 73% of healthcare organizations now using multiple public cloud vendors.1
Avoiding Digital Threats on the Road to Distributed Healthcare
Unfortunately, this distributed model also increases the attack surface for organizations and, thus, the risk of a costly data breach or outage. Healthcare data is particularly attractive to attackers because of its value on the dark web and aid in crafting successful social engineering attacks. Healthcare breaches doubled between 2020 and 2022 in the U.S.,2 highlighting the need for robust security.
Moving to a multicloud environment can also result in duplicate tools and policies, which increases complexity and risk. Healthcare organizations need consistent security across environments and applications that is scalable and easy to manage to reduce the workload on security and IT teams. It must also be fast to keep up with the sophisticated and automated threats targeting healthcare.
Enhancing Healthcare Outcomes with Robust Cyber Protection: The Collaborative Edge of F5, Intel, and Google Cloud
F5 has partnered with Intel and Google Cloud to secure today’s distributed healthcare environments with adaptive applications and fast, frictionless security. With Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) to offload compression and cryptographic functions, F5 solutions run faster, offering better protection for Google Cloud.
Bringing these technologies together helps you secure your applications and APIs for maximum uptime and performance anywhere they’re needed. You can also easily build and deploy new tools for value-based care with Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine and F5 application delivery. Using F5® BIG-IP® allows you to deploy applications with consistent policies in multiple clouds, as well as steer traffic for improved performance and get security closer to your applications and APIs.
API security can sometimes be overlooked, but research from Google found that 20% of security incidents among Google Cloud customers were due to API compromise.3 Securing your APIs and third-party integrations reduces the risk of a security breach or outage while allowing the collaboration needed to support comprehensive patient care and research.
F5 security solutions use machine learning and behavioral analytics to accurately identify threats against applications and APIs, including bots and human attackers to secure accounts, patient data, and valuable research against unauthorized access and fraud without adding friction for legitimate users. This approach enhances Google Cloud security tools with additional protection against modern application layer and API attacks that could lead to an outage or data breach. Intel QAT boosts security performance to increase protection.
For EHR systems, F5 offers pre-built, validated policies and templates specifically for Epic Systems applications to prevent downtime as a result of threats or misconfigurations, enabling organizations to deploy and defend valuable data and operations with consistent security across multiple clouds and on-premises infrastructure.
Empowering Secure Healthcare: Layered Defense Against Modern Threats
With F5, Intel, and Google Cloud, you can maintain reliable operations in the face of today’s modern threats. F5 is deployed in the top U.S. hospitals and mitigates 1 billion automated attacks per day, while Google Cloud supports accessible and value-based healthcare solutions. The combination of F5, Intel, and Google Cloud gives you the right tools to secure patient and research data everywhere without complexity by safeguarding your applications and APIs.
Learn more on f5.com
Sources:
1 State of Cloud in Healthcare 2023, Forrester, May 2023
2 2022 Healthcare Cybersecurity Year in Review, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, February 2023
3 Threat Horizons Report, Google Cybersecurity Action Team, April 2023
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