Aliens have invaded earth with the intent to wipe out mankind. But ex-scientist turned cable technician, David Levinson (Jeff Goldberg), helps mobilize a plan to use the “common cold” or computer “virus” to fight back against the alien species and bring down their defenses in the 1996 movie Independence Day. While the story is fiction, the potential damage that a virus or malware can do to businesses and peoples’ lives is all too real. In fact, attackers unleashed an average of more than nine new threats every second in 2010. The healthcare industry knows firsthand about virus outbreaks. Take the Conficker virus that infected hundreds of MRI devices around the world. In fact, healthcare leads the industry in data breaches with more than 400 health information breaches involving over 12 million records over the past two-plus years. According to Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), one reason the healthcare industry is more vulnerable than others is that information is shared across a wider array of devices. It resides not only on laptops and workstations but also on clinical, testing, and monitoring systems. Further, healthcare devices must meet high performance and maximum availability requirements around the clock. So what is healthcare IT doing to make sure services are available 24x7, while protecting patient data? In the January CIO Digest article, “4 Tips to Combat the Uncommon Cold” I had the opportunity to talk with ESG analyst Jon Oltsik and key IT decision makers from Continuum Health Partners, DrFirst, SAS, and The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust to uncover best practices around protecting vast number of endpoints to deliver high quality patient care. Check out the other healthcare related stories in this issue on Barnabas Health and the Italian National Cancer Institute. Products referenced in healthcare feature:
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