Are Healthcare Breaches Down Because of CASBs?

By Salim Hafid, Product Marketing Manager, Bitglass

Bitglass just released its fourth annual Healthcare Breach Report, which dives into healthcare breaches over 2017 and compares the rate of breach over previous years. A big surprise this year was the precipitous drop in the volume of breaches and the scope of each attack. Our research team set out to discover why this happened.

Our annual healthcare report is based on breach data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. The government mandates that all healthcare organizations and their affiliates publicly disclose breaches that affect at least 500 individuals. The result is several years of data on the causes of healthcare breaches as well as information about which firms are targeted by attackers.

It seems that after several years of being a top target for hackers looking to steal valuable data, healthcare firms' security teams are now getting their act together. For each organization in this vertical, security has become a priority. Many are migrating to the cloud in an effort to shift the infrastructure security burden to powerful tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. This shift to cloud has also driven many to adopt third-party security solutions that allow them to obtain cross-app security, achieve HIPAA compliance, and mitigate the risk and impact of breaches.

In particular, cloud access security brokers are taking the healthcare sector by storm and are proving to play an important part in preventing breaches. Back in 2015, few had a CASB deployed and many were at risk of massive data loss. Today, forward-thinking organizations like John Muir Health have deployed a Next-Gen CASB to great success. IT administrators can be immediately alerted to high-risk data outflows and new applications that pose a threat, and can define granular policies that prevent mega-breaches of the sort that cost Anthem and Premera hundreds of millions of dollars.

Read the full healthcare breach report to learn about the leading causes of breaches in the sector, the average cost of a stolen health record, and more.