How ecosystems help mitigate current and future health care cyber risks

Thinking about health care’s susceptibility, I’m reminded of a university-based health system client of mine. It needed to mitigate risk by sophisticating their standing against cyber threats.

Exacerbating the matter was insufficient IT staffing — a common issue I’ve found when addressing cybersecurity. My client specifically wanted visibility into its network, which included a mix of university and hospital data.

To provide that visibility, we knew a traditional, standalone solution wouldn’t really prepare our client for the future. What they needed was an ecosystem that aligned key elements — the EY team, an EY alliance partner, the client and their existing vendors — plus all the tech, systems and processes that support everything. Using this approach positioned the client to address their current position and future-fit them for cyber threats to come.

Based on the understanding that our teams had of the client, it made the most sense to include in this ecosystem an EY Alliance partner specializing in secure, digital infrastructure — for this engagement, Splunk made the most sense to complement the client’s existing partners.

A collaborative, calibrated approach

The important thing to consider with ecosystems is that they’re not a one-ecosystem-fits-all fix. Like each client — and each client’s problems — ecosystems are unique. I’ve found that the best-fit ecosystems are built on understanding: of the industry, of the client’s issues and of the client’s future aspirations. And that makes relationships all the more important.

Take my client, for instance. If my team and I didn’t know the client as well as we did, we couldn’t have helped it as much as we did. That’s because our deep understanding informed the ecosystem we orchestrated and applied to its particular situation. And that meant that the cybersecurity strategy programs we created and helped implement were that much more effective. It’s as simple as that.