As we discussed in a recent blog, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is today an essential component in healthcare workflows already – and it’s still growing in spite of its inherent risks. This Mobile Business Insights article explains how adoption rates for BYOD are expected to reach 50 percent in North American companies in 2018. For healthcare workers, BYOD offers the mobility employees need while moving rapidly from intensive care units to emergency rooms to outpatient facilities, all while maintaining access to a wide variety of workflow applications and resources at the point of care.
According to the Ponemon Institute’s “Fourth Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy and Data Security,” 88 percent of healthcare organizations allow employee-owned mobile devices to connect to the hospital network, and more than half of employees take advantage of this policy.[1] Still, the report adds that more than half of organizations lack confidence in the security of employee-owned devices. Furthermore, when you factor in the proliferation of IoT in healthcare with BYOD adoption, healthcare networks are now connected to vast numbers of endpoint devices, and this vulnerability increase has greatly outpaced Healthcare IT’s security efforts.
If compromised, lost, or stolen, these mini-computers employees have at arm’s length could reveal the keys to your healthcare organization’s data and intellectual property. Because of the robustness of patient data at risk (electronic health records contain a complete picture of their identity, including date of birth, insurance policy numbers, billing and account numbers, current and past addresses, social security numbers, and other extremely sensitive information), healthcare organizations need to be ultra-sensitive to securing data on these BYOD smartphones and tablets.
SyncDog’s latest industry-leading whitepaper, “BYOD Data Security Threat in Healthcare – 5 Things to Reduce Data Risk,” explores the potentially catastrophic risk when it comes to healthcare data, and what you can do to make sure your organization’s data is better protected while enabling healthcare workforces with the tools they need to maintain productivity and effective care. Below is a condensed list from the whitepaper that outlines five things you can do in your company to reduce risks with BYOD.
5 Things to Reduce BYOD Risk in Healthcare
- Ensure endpoint devices are included in your compliance initiatives.
- Implement containerization with military-grade encryption for data at rest on the device and data in transit to/from your network.
- Correlate your mobile event log data alongside your other IT asset log data for the true picture of user activity across your network.
- Have a BYOD policy to stand by and educate your employees on the dangers of BYOD.
- Recognize EMM and Mobile Device Management aren’t security systems and fortify your BYOD policies.
SyncDog’s answer to enhancing mobile device security in healthcare is their containerized BYOD security product, Secure.Systems™. Secure.Systems™ installs in minutes and protects data on the device and data in transit in a NIST-certified, containerized workspace. The containerized workspace delivers a highly functional and easy app experience for users, and protects client enterprise networks with a secure, partitioned FIPS 140-2 certified* container on both iOS and Android devices. Secure.Systems™ secures data both on the device and in transit using AES 256-bit encryption.
A full suite of mobile-enabled productivity applications is available in the defense-grade container, including SharePoint, Skype for Business, Office 365 Enterprise, Enterprise Chat, Geo-location Services, DropBox, a Personal Information Management (PIM) suite, Office Suite, File Sync, and Secure Mobile App Management & Development functions. Secure.Systems™ can be deployed on-premise, as a cloud-based managed service, or as hybrid of both. For more information about Secure.Systems™ deployment via managed service or for a free trial of the product please visit https://secure.systems.
Click here to read SyncDog’s whitepaper “BYOD Data Security Threat in Healthcare – 5 Things to Reduce Data Risk,”.
[1]https://www.ponemon.org/local/upload/file/ID%20ExpertsPatient%20Privacy%20%26%20Data%20Security%20Report%20FINAL1-1.pdf
