By Colette Kitterhing, vice president of UK and Ireland at Netskope
Healthcare is changing at a rapid pace, as the health industry digitally transforms to meet patient expectations. Despite this, trust is still delicate in the industry.
When people can’t book appointments, deal with broken communication between clinicians or receive incorrect diagnoses, their confidence deteriorates.
Less than half (45 per cent) of patients say they still trust the healthcare system after facing these issues.
Patients expect a clear and smooth connection across care pathways, matching the expectations of clinicians who desire improved efficiency and better health outcomes.
To achieve this, hospitals are rapidly adopting digital tools: linking medical devices, introducing AI and shifting records and workflows into the cloud.
This ongoing transformation offers the prospect of quicker, more tailored and more intelligent care.
Yet it also means that every element of the system, from appointment booking to radiology, now relies on uninterrupted digital access to large volumes of highly sensitive data.
Each step forward in digital capability brings increased vulnerability, and this is where the sector risks becoming unsecure. Access to data is vital, but safeguarding it is even more important.
Balancing Progress with Protection
Healthcare is amongst the most targeted industries in the UK for cyber-attacks, with 41 per cent of health and social care businesses reporting an attack in 2025.
The data it holds is uniquely valuable, with healthcare records containing a full spectrum of personally identifiable information, often including both private medical history and financial information.
This is attractive for cybercriminals who can use this data for financial fraud, identity theft, and blackmail.
However, the systems in which this data resides—and through which healthcare professionals access it—are struggling. Legacy systems and technical debt have become liabilities, making healthcare organisations easy targets for attackers.
Decades-old electronic healthcare record (EHR) systems, mainframes and custom apps are difficult to patch or integrate to new workflows and systems.
Meanwhile, pandemic-era quick fixes—most notably VPNs bolted onto aging networks—have left behind brittleness and security gaps.
These legacy tools exist in a sprawl of overlapping systems that fragment visibility, inflate costs and erode the “always on” reliability that healthcare depends on.
Highly valuable data and ill-equipped infrastructure is the perfect prescription to delay diagnoses, disrupt treatment plans and shake patient confidence.
The Evolving Risk Landscape in Healthcare
When it comes to risk in healthcare, the impact goes far beyond fines or reputational harm.
It can be measured in lives put in jeopardy when critical systems go offline and in the trust lost when sensitive records are exposed.
Ransomware is a particularly acute cyber threat.
When clinicians are locked out of essential tools, or patients face treatment delays, the pressure to pay becomes overwhelming—and every payment fuels the criminal networks behind these attacks.
Ransomware-as-a-service has made it easier than ever to launch sophisticated campaigns, accelerating breaches across the sector and fuelling a cycle of cybercrime.
Ransomware is just one weapon in a growing arsenal.
From data theft and extortion to service disruption, cybercriminals have a wealth of tactics up their sleeves, and it only takes one successful breach to paralyse care delivery.
Insider and third-party exposure add further vulnerability, as overstretched staff, contractors, and business associates expand the attack surface.
Meanwhile the rapid adoption of AI is creating new channels for sensitive information to slip through the cracks via prompts, outputs and shadow tools without clear visibility and guardrails.
Together, these pressures form a complex, converging risk landscape that traditional perimeter defences and point solutions are not designed to handle.
A Unified Approach to Safeguarding Modern Healthcare
Colette Kitterhing
As the health industry gets serious about the effective use of data to inform care pathways and improve health outcomes, it must also get much more serious about the architectures it implements to secure that data.
Piecemeal solutions are simply not good enough and should be recognised as out of step with a comprehensive data strategy.
Data security needs to be fully unified, closing the gaps that allow risk to spread across the system—integrating seamlessly, scaling with demand, removing friction for appropriate access, and adapting to the real-time context of users, devices and data.
A Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform provides that foundation.
As a framework, SASE brings together key network and data protection capabilities into a unified, cloud-delivered architecture.
It enables healthcare organisations to see and manage the full spectrum of risk through a single lens—connecting access control, data protection and threat prevention around the user and the data.
At the heart of this model sit zero trust principles, in which context signals are continuously evaluated and access decisions adapted, based on user identity and behaviour, device posture, location, data sensitivity and activity.
This ensures that clinicians, contractors, and third parties are granted only the access they need, when they need it, and no more.
Inline data protection is an essential piece of the puzzle—protecting data in motion as much as data at rest.
Advanced inspection and data awareness help identify and safeguard sensitive information as it moves across cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and web traffic.
In an environment where personal health information and research data are among the most valuable targets for data theft, preventing misuse or leakage is as critical as stopping the attack itself.
By bringing data security together in one place, healthcare organisations gain a clear view of their information and overall security posture in a single platform.
This allows them to manage risk more effectively, from exposure to disruption, assessing events and data within one consistent framework.
Additionally, to assess events and adapt policies in real time, organisations can combine SASE with its detection and response, backup and recovery, and IT service management tools to create end-to-end visibility.
This reduces the friction often created between care and security, enabling caregivers to make full use of the tools available to them, whilst resting assured that their patients’ data remains safe.
The biggest opportunity and challenge for the healthcare sector today is innovating to streamline the patient experience, whilst reducing the risk to patient data.
Those that succeed will be able to provide care that is secure, connected and trusted, without sacrificing progress.
