Cyber threats are constantly evolving.
With the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence across numerous sectors, security concerns have become top of mind for many leaders and innovators. Especially for healthcare, mitigating cybersecurity breaches is of paramount importance.
The growth of the cybersecurity industry has paralleled the rapid explosion of data and means to harness information. In fact, the cybersecurity market was estimated to be valued at nearly $222 billion in 2023 and continues to rapidly grow. The healthcare industry contributes a large part of this market, given how much sensitive and private data the sector generates on a day-to-day basis.
Now, security has become crucial as healthcare players are increasingly seeking to incorporate artificial intelligence and digital tools into their organizations. Many provider systems and hospitals often have to integrate with large cloud providers to harness the newest and latest technology. This is why big technology players, despite not traditionally being cybersecurity focused companies, are now devoting a massive amount of resources to developing healthcare products with stringent security and privacy standards in mind. For example, Google Cloud’s MedLM foundation model suite, which entails the company’s push into enterprise AI solutions for healthcare organizations, was developed with the highest standards of security and compliance in mind; in fact, the company’s Gemini AI platform provides its own threat intelligence capabilities for organizations to leverage in order to identify and mitigate security breaches in a timely manner. Similarly, Microsoft Cloud has invested billions to ensure its cloud and AI services pursue elevated standards for security; its Defender for Cloud platform, for example, manages security across product suites and can be integrated to a high level of granularity. AWS, yet another large player in providing healthcare organizations with a variety of cloud based AI tools, provides third party solutions in its marketplace for its customers to leverage and customize per their needs. The company emphasizes that their technology and approach "can help preserve security and data privacy and maintain provider-patient trust.”
Thus, it is clear that technology giants are making this a top priority in their R&D processes and investments. But some may ask, why? And what’s next?
2024 certainly raised many concerns for the industry and shed light as to WHY security has to become a top priority, especially in healthcare. One of the most significant security events of the year was the CrowdStrike outage that occurred last summer which affected nearly every major sector. However, healthcare was especially hard hit. Steve Alder, Editor-in-Chief of the HIPAA Journal, comments that “The biggest losses are thought to have been experienced by the healthcare industry. Healthcare is estimated to have suffered direct losses of $1.94 billion, with an average estimated loss of $64.6 million per company.” Many other organizations experienced numerous security incidents in 2024 as well, ranging from smaller medical practices to enterprise-wide healthcare data companies. Leaders and innovators are increasingly coming to terms with the fact that they need to build out more sustainable solutions that prevent these breaches, rather than solely resorting to reactive solutions. However, regardless of preparation and all possible contingency plans, the realm of AI is evolving so quickly that no amount of defense will likely be able to prepare for everything. Indeed, the technology is transforming so quickly that organizations may not even recognize potential threats or vulnerabilities until they are exposed in a malignant fashion. Therefore, the best solution may be to raise awareness and develop plans in case of unprecedented and unforeseen threats and breaches, in addition to actively investing in and upgrading security infrastructure.
Hence, 2025 will be a blockbuster year to continue learning and improving on this front. Given how rapidly technology is transforming, innovators, healthcare leaders and policy makers alike will undoubtedly be forced remain nimble and proactive with the constantly evolving threat landscape.
