Like many other industries, Healthcare has undergone significant digital transformation over the past decade. From the passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) of 2009 which mandated the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) to the proliferation of patient portals, more and more medical information is being managed online. This creates unique challenges when it comes to securing these health-related applications and the highly sensitive data they manage. 

Privacy and Security in healthcare applications is critical. These applications handle sensitive personal information, which includes medical records, personally identifiable information (PII), and insurance, billing, and payment information. Ensuring the privacy and security of this information is essential to maintaining trust and protecting privacy. This data is also highly regulated under a number of federal regulations. Securing these applications should be a mission-critical function for your organization.

How Aspm Helps Healthcare Companies

ASPM brings all your security data onto one platform so that alerts are easier to manage and resolve. By providing greater visibility, an ASPM platform can help healthcare companies deliver safer and more secure applications. This builds trust with your users and can become a sales enabler for your organization. With ASPM, you can protect patient data, avoid disruption to patient care, meet compliance requirements, and reduce costs associated with fixing application vulnerabilities.

Protecting Patient Data

From electronic medical records (EMRs) to EHRs to payment data and beyond, healthcare deals with an incredible amount of highly sensitive patient data. Any breach that exposes this data opens your organization to significant fines and damages your reputation, impacting future business. Making sure you are developing and deploying secure applications is one of the best ways to prevent a breach from destroying your brand and emptying your pockets.

Avoiding Disruption to Patient Care

Patient care goes far beyond EHRs. Think of all the connected devices that we rely on every day: blood glucose monitors, cardiac rhythm monitors, blood pressure meters, even connected inhalers and ingestible sensors! All of these devices run on applications. Or imagine a scenario where a patient is receiving emergency care and physicians can’t access their medical records. Any disruption to these applications, say through a breach or the injection of malicious code, represents a risk to patients. To avoid disruption to patient care, these applications must be secure. ASPM is the only AppSec platform that can monitor and secure applications from code to cloud. 

Meeting Compliance Requirements

The healthcare industry is heavily regulated. Organizations must adhere to stringent industry-specific regulations like HIPAA and HITRUST. In addition, they are also impacted by other cybersecurity standards like SOC 2 Type 2, PCI-DSS for handling payment information, and GDPR data privacy in the EU. These regulations require regular compliance audits or attestation reports on the security of your applications. An ASPM platform can help you easily identify the correct data to support your audits.

Reducing Costs and Achieving Operational Efficiencies

Because ASPM is able to consolidate all alerts on one platform and then provide context for these alerts, organizations are better able to identify the most critical risks. This makes security teams more efficient because they know which critical fixes to address first. Furthermore, ASPM provides a number of developer integrations so that defects like known open source vulnerabilities or hardcoded secrets can be addressed – and even prevented – before they are merged into the main branch. Fixing defects earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) reduces costs significantly. 

What Is Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)?

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is an AppSec platform that continuously assesses, manages, and enhances the security of modern applications to improve the overall risk posture of an organization. 

ASPM provides visibility, prioritization, and remediation of security vulnerabilities and defects across the entire SDLC. Code to cloud coverage is achieved by ingesting data from multiple sources – like application security testing (AST) tools, repo data, and more – then analyzing these findings to identify the most critical risks to the business. 

ASPM platforms act as a management and orchestration layer for security tooling, so that you can enable controls and enforce security policies. By providing consolidated application security findings on one platform, ASPM delivers a comprehensive view of vulnerabilities and risk across an entire organization while also ​​facilitating the management and remediation of individual findings.

With ASPM, you gain the following key functionalities:

• Code-to-Cloud Visibility: A complete view of your SDLC, including your code, tooling, processes, and data from all your operational environments. 
• Vulnerability Scanning: Regular scans of applications for known security issues, using a wide range of native and third-party testing tools, such as secrets scanning, SCA, and SAST.
• Prioritization and Risk Management: The ability to prioritize the most critical risks to your organization so you can fix them first.
• Remediation and Mitigation: Fixes always come with context that makes remediation much easier and faster.
• Compliance Reporting: ASPM delivers the data required for numerous compliance frameworks and regulations, including HIPAA, FDA, and GDPR.
• Reporting and Analytics: Generate reports and analytics that help organizations understand the security posture of their applications over time.

By assessing and enhancing the security of your applications, ASPM helps you address AppSec chaos. It is essential for any organization that wants to protect against cyber threats that target the application layer.

The Benefits of APSM for Healthcare

As healthcare-related applications become more complex, the need to secure them has become more pressing. By using an ASPM platform, you gain greater efficiencies when it comes to visibility, prioritization, and remediation.

Enhanced Visibility and Context

Modern applications have grown increasingly complex. They are inextricably linked with the pipelines that build and deploy software. A significant number of these pipeline tools remain beyond the direct oversight of security teams, falling under domains like engineering or DevOps. This makes ASPM a game-changer. ASPM platforms break down barriers between tools to deliver holistic, code-to-cloud visibility of applications. ASPM also provides a real-time snapshot of an application’s risk, tying together various alerts to present a comprehensive and contextual understanding of your organization’s vulnerabilities.

Better Prioritization

With the number of AST tools scanning your applications, organizations are often inundated with alerts, making risk prioritization challenging. ASPM addresses this head-on, facilitating traceability across the SDLC. This feature highlights the interconnections between different alerts, enabling organizations to pinpoint and address their most pressing threats while effectively eliminating distractions. In addition, ASPM is adaptable to the specific needs of your organization, allowing you to establish custom policies that mirror your unique security requirements.

Faster Remediation at Scale

While traditional security tools are adept at pinpointing vulnerabilities, they fall short when it comes to remediation. Here, ASPM stands apart. It aggregates security data from diverse sources, providing context to create a holistic view of how alerts from multiple tools relate to one another. Such comprehensive insights shed light on the overall health of your entire SDLC. ASPM’s prowess doesn’t just stop at identification. It facilitates large-scale remediation, enabling organizations to address multiple instances of a singular vulnerability at once. This capability saves significant time and resources.

Controlled Shift Left That Works

Security solutions have struggled to keep pace with rapid innovation from developer and DevOps teams. ASPM, however, ensures that while security remains paramount, development remains unhindered. This controlled shift left approach builds a collaborative environment between security and engineering teams using a suite of features like IDE plugins, PR scans, CLI, and automated workflows.

Cycode’s Complete ASPM

Today’s healthcare organizations need to innovate continuously to meet patients’ high expectations. To meet these expectations, applications must be released faster and more frequently than ever before. Protecting your organization, however, requires these applications to be secure when deployed.

With our complete Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform, you can be confident that you are releasing secure software. Cycode allows you to select and connect your existing third-party security scanners or replace them altogether and use our own native scanners. Either way, Cycode delivers total visibility of your application and your SDLC, providing the context you need to identify and eliminate the most pressing threats to your business. 

Cycode’s complete ASPM platform unites security and development teams with instant visibility. Our Risk Intelligence Graph (RIG) provides intelligent context for all your alerts. We help security and development teams work better together by allowing teams to prioritize and remediate the most critical vulnerabilities so developers can focus on what they do best: create innovative features that help differentiate your business.

Cycode ASPM

Want to learn more about Cycode’s complete ASPM platform? Book a demo now to find out how we can help you achieve faster time to value, reduce critical vulnerabilities, and remediate faster to secure your healthcare applications and data.

The post Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) and Healthcare appeared first on Cycode.