Cyberattacks on healthcare organizations have increased in recent years. As we have already stated on our blog, this is due to the sector’s unpreparedness to deal with confidential data, since health services do not invest as they should in information security. 

In addition, health professionals, for the most part, are not trained to detect threats in virtual environments and do not receive proper awareness of the inconvenience a malicious action can cause. 

With the Covid-19 pandemic, this problem has worsened, since remote work favors access to personal devices for corporate purposes, making the IT infrastructure of institutions even more vulnerable. Because of this, we strongly recommend implementing cybersecurity solutions such as PAM to protect this infrastructure. 

In this article, we will explain what a PAM solution is and how it can benefit healthcare services. To facilitate your reading, we divided the text into three main topics:

• What is a PAM Solution, and Why is It Important?

• How Does Pam Help Protect Healthcare Organizations?
• About senhasegura

Keep reading!

1. What is a PAM Solution, and Why is It Important?

Privileged Access Management (PAM) consists of strategies and tools that allow you to protect technological environments, controlling privileged access and permissions for systems, processes, accounts, and users.

In practice, this solution makes it possible to prevent and correct damage resulting from threats to privileged credentials, such as carelessness by employees and attacks by malicious agents.

Its main purpose is to apply the concept of least privilege, restricting access rights and permissions, ensuring that users have only the access necessary to perform their duties. 

For this reason, experts and technologists consider this feature one of the most important for reducing cyber risks and reinforce its advantages for the Return on Investment (ROI) in security.

2. How Does Pam Help Protect Healthcare Organizations?

PAM is a solution that benefits healthcare services and medical organizations in a variety of ways: by protecting legacy devices, managing third-party access in the environment, and protecting them against insider threats. See how senhasegura helps in these aspects:

• Legacy Device Protection:

PAM makes it possible to remove passwords and credentials encoded in scripts, application code, and configuration files, in addition to automatically managing these passwords.

This is possible because the application receives the updated password of the resource to be accessed in a way that keeps critical data inaccessible to malicious users.

• Third-party Management:

Medical organizations typically have a heterogeneous infrastructure, with devices from numerous manufacturers. This is a factor that adds to the complexity of the maintenance process for these devices, which rely on multiple vendors, third-party assistance, consultants, and service providers, who need access to your organization’s network resources. This type of access requires even more protection than by employees, and with the use of PAM, your system will be protected.

• Insider Threats:

When it comes to data breaches, employees themselves can pose risks to the company. In order to avoid these risks, PAM makes it possible to limit users’ privileges and have control over access to privileged accounts.

Using this important information security tool brings a series of positive results for organizations. Among them, the following stand out:

• Cyber Risk Reduction: PAM drastically reduces the risks associated with attacks by malicious actors in virtual environments;
• Effective Management of Credentials: Healthcare employees will only have the necessary access to perform their duties;
• Remote Access Protection: It is a way to protect IT systems that are more vulnerable with remote work, which has become a reality for many professionals in times of a pandemic;
• Reduction in Incident Response Time: With PAM‘s efficiency in issuing reports, alerts, in addition to dashboards and remote session recording, operations are not stopped for a long time, nor do they cause negative impacts on productivity;
• Unified OT and IT Security: PAM considers the convergence between OT and IT in Industry 4.0; 
• Compliance with Security Policies: Healthcare services need to follow security policies in order to preserve the confidentiality of their patients’/clients’ data, and PAM makes it possible to adopt the necessary standards to achieve this goal.

In Brazil, the main legislation on the subject is the General Data Protection Law (LGPD), which has been in force since August 2020. 

However, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is also a reference for good security practices, as well as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a set of North American protection standards aimed at health services. 

3. About senhasegura

In order to avoid the loss of information and traceability of actions in networks, databases, servers, and devices, senhasegura works to ensure digital sovereignty for institutions in various areas, including healthcare.

Also, it brings these organizations into compliance with auditing requirements and security standards, such as:

• HIPAA;
•  LGPD;
•  GDPR;
• ISO 27001;
• PCI DSS; 
• and Sarbanes-Oxley.

By reading this article, you have understood how a PAM solution can be useful to healthcare services.

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