Conquering the Unique IAM Challenges in Healthcare

Healthcare sector entities have a special mix of identity and access management challenges, but additional factors, including the shortage of skilled cybersecurity expertise, make the difficulties even tougher, says Dave Summitt, vice president of cybersecurity at the Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute.

See Also: Webinar Live Tomorrow | The Evolution of Network Architecture: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

“There are so many types of users that we have in healthcare, and obviously, the results of the ‘work from home’ rush from the pandemic didn’t help at all, because we were really not prepared for something like that,” he said.

Properly vetting a rotation of people – including conducting background checks to verify who’s going in and out of a healthcare organization’s systems – can be daunting from a cybersecurity and data privacy perspective, Summitt said. And finding the right resources is a major challenge in access management.

“Not getting enough qualified identity and access management people is a huge problem when we’re actually trying to build access management teams,” he said.

In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, Summitt discusses:

• The top IAM challenges in healthcare environments;
• Where the use of multifactor authentication is essential, and where it’s not, in healthcare settings;
• Cloud IAM considerations.

Summitt, who has nearly 40 years of IT experience in both the federal and private sectors, has been developing security teams and implementing cybersecurity management programs for the past 15 years. He has held security roles within national healthcare organizations and the U.S. Department of Defense and previously served as CISO at the Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute.