The study, conducted by Phronesis Partners for Akamai, gathered insights from 232 healthcare and life sciences leaders across the U.S., EMEA, LATAM, and APAC to understand their approach to segmentation and ransomware.
Key takeaways:
Cybersecurity failures pose direct risks to patient safety and privacy. Organizations in highly regulated environments face more than just IT issues. Breaches compromise patient care, regulatory compliance, and organizational reputation, making resilient defenses like segmentation a business necessity.
Traditional perimeter defenses are no longer sufficient against lateral movement. Attackers often move freely once they bypass the network edge. Implementing microsegmentation stops this progression by tying access controls to specific workloads rather than static networks.
Segmentation shifts the security focus from prevention to blast radius containment. By isolating high-risk assets and critical patient data, organizations can maintain continuity of care during an active threat while reducing the time required to stop ransomware by up to 31%.
- Security investments now directly influence financial outcomes through cyber insurance. Insurers increasingly view segmentation favorably or even make it mandatory for policy renewal, which improves the likelihood of claim approval and lowers overall bottom-line costs.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
The threat is persistent, with 76% of organizations facing at least one attack in the past two years, and roughly one-quarter of respondents reporting breaches as frequently as once per quarter.
Microsegmentation provides a significant speed advantage in threat containment, specifically resulting in a 31% reduction in the time it takes for life sciences organizations to stop a ransomware attack.
Organizations primarily use segmentation to secure endpoints (up to 91%), business-critical applications (up to 82%), servers (up to 75%), and domain controllers or identity infrastructure (up to 64%).
Despite its benefits, the primary barriers to successful implementation are network complexity, the associated costs, and organizational resistance to the change.
Segmentation is increasingly critical for financial protection, as it is mandatory for renewal at 35% of healthcare organizations, and 75% of respondents believe it improves their chances of insurance claim approval.
Momentum is growing, with 47% of healthcare organizations and 53% of life sciences companies planning to adopt segmentation within the next two years, while current users are largely increasing their budgets.