Compared with other major industries, healthcare believes itself to be at significantly lower risk for data breaches now than when the COVID crisis began prompting employers to let staff work from home.
That’s according to 937 IT professionals who responded to a global, cross-industry survey commissioned by Netwrix, a cybersecurity supplier based in Irvine, Calif.
Only 18% of healthcare respondents told the company they felt at greater cybersecurity risk in June than before the pandemic descended.
That was the lowest of all industries analyzed, as the survey report shows healthcare distantly trailing three industries bunched closely together—education (33%), finance (30%) and government (29%).
Of those healthcare IT people who did feel more vulnerable during the work-from-home trend than before it started, this subgroup collectively named its biggest concerns as:
- 60%—Suffering stronger or more frequent cyberattacks
- 60%—Having network users who may ignore security guidelines
- 40%—Unexpected security gaps caused by widespread working from home
- 20%—Security sacrificed to maximize availability
Meanwhile healthcare respondents split quite closely among those who improved their cybersecurity (39%) and those who say that the threat landscape hasn’t really changed for them since the pandemic (43%), Netwrix reports.
“‘Challenging’ and ‘hectic’ aren’t strong enough words to describe rapid transition to remote work,” the report authors write. “Surprisingly, 39% of respondents [across all industries] believe that their security posture has actually improved during these uncertain times. Whether they strengthened old security policies or adopted new tools, we are very glad that some organizations were able to rise so quickly to the challenge presented by this crisis.”
Read the whole report (PDF).
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.