Healthcare cybersecurity market poised for growth over the coming years

The healthcare cybersecurity market was valued at $8.2 billion in 2018, and it's only expected to grow from there, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 19.1% from this year through 2025.

The cybersecurity market is in a good position to become an avenue of investment over the coming years, driven in part by the fast-paced digital transformation of the worldwide healthcare industry, according to data from Global Market Insights.

The rapid adoption of digital technologies by healthcare providers is considered beneficial to the industry, but it brings with it some unique challenges -- including cyberthreats, in which a system's vulnerabilities are exploited by malicious parties to steal or damage data for financial gain.

WHAT'S THE IMPACT

Data breaches cost the healthcare industry more than $5.6 billion annually, the data showed. Consequently, many healthcare organizations in the U.S. and abroad have assigned greater importance to their respective digital security requirements, which is putting the cybersecurity market in a position for considerable growth.

The report predicts two trends: the migration to the cloud, and the increasing frequency of ransomware attacks.

Migrating data reserves to the cloud is increasingly common in healthcare, likely due to the financial and operational benefits. The problem is that many organizations are unaware of, or undereducated on the perils associated with cloud networks, and some start migrating their data without the proper preparation. Due to the nature of the process, organizations have to be several steps ahead of would-be attackers if they want to successfully keep their cloud data safe and ensure everything runs smoothly on the operations side.

Cyberattacks occur largely because of the high price of stolen healthcare records, which net about $50 per file on the black market. That would require most healthcare cloud services to be low-risk, but according to a McAfee survey, 93% of cloud services are medium- to high-risk, which makes it easier for cyberattackers to get their hands on patient records. Over the past year, roughly 94 million health records have been exposed to cyberattacks.

Part of the market outlook is due to this big cybersecurity gap, which is a big focus for providers over the next several years. The average healthcare organization uploads almost seven terabytes of data each month, but only 15.4% of services have multi-factorial authentication support, which is essential in preventing breaches.

THE LARGER TREND

Cybersecurity dashboards are an integral component of any successful health system, helping to stop breaches before they happen and quash threats that manage to slip past their safeguards. It's about protecting patient information, as well as the systems' own brands and reputations.

The components of a successful dashboard are largely dependent on the needs of an organization, but there are a few characteristics common to the most effective approaches.
 

Twitter: @JELagasse

Email the writer: jeff.lagasse@himssmedia.com