Data is the lifeblood of the modern healthcare industry, but as technology weaves itself ever deeper into its fabric a significant concern arises — non-human identities-based cyber attacks that put sensitive information and lives at unnecessary risk. Consequently, the healthcare industry finds itself in the crosshairs of malicious actors, drawn by the treasure trove of valuable data and the potential to sow chaos.
Enterprise Security for AI Agents & Non-Human Identities
Key cybersecurity challenges in healthcare
Highlights
- Securing AI-enabled tools and autonomous systems: Sophisticated new AI-enabled tools empower healthcare providers to offer additional personalized services, improved preventative care, 24/7 monitoring, and even human resource optimization but introduce additional attack surfaces to secure, and demand security at scale throughout the lifecycle of their implementation.
- Securing without Disrupting: Downtime in healthcare often has fatal consequences, with severe service outages measured in terms of casualties per hour. IT security teams juggle the competing priorities of maintaining a secure compliant environment while minimizing the impact of doing so.
- Contextual visibility across 3rd Party Integrations: The service-chain-oriented nature of the industry requires highly sensitive consumer data to remain portable without compromising compliance and regulatory standards.
Securing AI-enabled tools and autonomous systems
Interconnected devices, cloud services, and consequently non-human identities aren’t new to healthcare, but the advent of AI-enabled tools has further exacerbated the proliferation of NHIs in healthcare environments. By leveraging AI, healthcare vendors have been able to provide more personalized and prescriptive healthcare at scale to meet the increasingly complex demand of their consumers. AI functionalities (even those found in most smartwatches) are used to proactively monitor for heart conditions and other systemic issues that are too time-intensive or nuanced for humans to detect manually. And we’ve barely scraped the surface of all the ways we can extract power from AI and autonomous systems. But all this power comes at a price – AI systems are data-hungry and autonomous systems require expansive permissions to interact with resources at a large scale. These essentially unmanned systems are often given excessive permissions with little to no governance, leading to significant exposure when a single asset is compromised. In order to narrow the scope of risk associated with any such system, unique identities should be used with as narrow a scope of permissions as possible while maintaining intended functionality. Determining the necessary permissions to deliver functionality while avoiding excessive permissioning is a challenging but necessary step in the workflow of securely managing NHIs while minimizing risk. Additionally, like passports with humans, NHIs themselves should be retired effectively if and when their intended function is complete.
Contextual visibility across 3rd Party Integrations
Implementing effective IAM for non-human identities is difficult in complex healthcare IT environments with diverse systems and devices. Each connected device requires a unique identity to authenticate and communicate securely, but many healthcare organizations need help to maintain visibility and control over this ever-expanding non-human identity landscape. Having an understanding of all the non-human identities with access to sensitive data is a daunting task, but it’s only half the battle. After all tools, vaults, and repositories have been scanned and all identities have been thoroughly inventoried, contextual awareness is needed to understand and determine next steps. Contextual awareness around the creation and intentional use of NHIs helps determine which identities are incorrectly scoped, have exceeded their useful lifetime, or are being used inappropriately and could be a compliance or regulatory violation.
Securing without Disrupting
Modern healthcare security methodologies emphasize a ‘Zero Trust’ approach to security architectures and solutions. While Zero Trust solutions such as ZTNA often focus on the “user→application” path, Zero Trust as a philosophy focuses on the “in-line” insertion of security between a source and a destination. In addition to in-line security technologies, API-based posture management tools maintain standardized sterile and compliant environments as well as reduce scope of exposure in the event that a component is compromised. All these approaches greatly improve security hygiene for human identities and infrastructure, but entirely skip securing non-human identities – identities which often have powerful, always-on access to sensitive data and systems.
The Solution: Entro Security
Meet Entro. Entro is the first holistic non-human identities security platform that detects, safeguards, and enriches secrets with context. With it, you can govern all non-human identities from a single interface, proactively identify and remediate risks, and simplify compliance with regulations like PCI DSS. All in all, insights into your non-human identity landscape are within your arm’s reach. Take the first step. Book a demo.dentify and remediate risks, and simplify compliance with regulations like PCI DSS. All in all, insights into your non-human identity landscape are within your arm’s reach. Take the first step. Book a demo.
