Real-time visibility of IT systems vital for healthcare sector, says Tanium

When a patient goes to a hospital with a serious medical condition, the first thing doctors do is run diagnostic imaging e.g. X-rays or MRI scans to find out what the ailment is and then prescribe the proper course of treatment.

Tanium’s Director, Solution Engineering, Dominic Cheah, said this was a necessary step so that doctors have full visibility of what is going on in the patient’s body to ensure the correct treatment is administered.

Expanding on the example, he explained that for IT infrastructure used in the healthcare sector, full visibility is similarly essential to protect them from unexpected attacks such as ransomware. He added that visibility is also required to be able to take immediate remedial measures in case an unexpected attack occurred.

“IT is pervasive and a critical dependency to the goal of serving patients, efficiently, quickly, accurately and safely,” he noted.

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The Tanium official was speaking during a presentation at the recent GovInsider Live Healthcare Day.

Myriad of IT challenges

Tanium said the healthcare sector faces a myriad of IT challenges from digitalisation, increasing workloads, limited manpower and escalating costs.

This is on top of other problems like security breaches, which can lead to leakage of sensitive patient data, as well as stringent regulatory requirements, and systems unavailability.

To combat all this, the healthcare sector needs resilient IT systems to function properly, and this can only be possible when there is full visibility of the endpoint environment.

On the role Tanium can play to help the healthcare sector, he added: “We can’t help you hire more doctors and nurses, but we can certainly help you improve the resilience of your IT systems that you rely on to provide the most efficient and effective care possible to patients”.

Guarding against ransomware attacks

In terms of disruption, the WannaCry ransomware virus that affected millions of computers in 2017 was to the IT sector akin to the Covid-19 pandemic that affected millions of people.

The ransomware had a major impact globally and the UK’s National Health Services (NHS) suffered a loss of £90 million (S$155 million) on account of having outdated and unpatched software systems on its computers, according to investigations done in the aftermath of the attack.

“We need to have the ability to know what is happening in our endpoint environment to prevent outages such as the NHS incident,” Cheah said.

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There is an urgent need to know where sensitive patient data is residing, especially as the healthcare sector increasingly adopts artificial intelligence (AI) for improving patient outcomes, according to Tanium. 

The question that needs to be answered is: “How do you protect that data and make sure that data that's sitting around in endpoint environments are properly protected?”

Adding to this point, Tanium’s Asia Pacific VP, Nick Lim, said that real-time data is critically important in healthcare. Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications used in the sector require up-to-date data, and for this, there is an “urgent need for the sector to have real-time visibility, control, and remediation capability”. 

Tanium currently manages 32 million endpoints globally and 50 per cent of Fortune 100 companies, including eight out of 10 US financial institutions, use its products to secure their endpoints.

Securing over 100,000 endpoint devices

UK-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, with more than 89,000 employees in over 100 countries and around 125,000 endpoint devices ranging from personal laptops to enterprise servers, uses Tanium to consolidate its multiple endpoint management tools into just one.

AstraZeneca said that the patching process which previously used to take a week to complete can now be done within 10 minutes by using Tanium.

Cheah observed that for IT systems generally, and especially in a vital sector like healthcare, it is not always possible to provide 100 per cent prevention from virus attacks.

“There will always be that something unknown but what is important is you need a capability to be able to very quickly respond when something happens.

“That’s really the building block to ensure high availability of the IT environment that the healthcare sector is relying on to provide all these interesting services to improve services,” he said.

Tanium’s healthcare customers use its products to get real-time visibility on what is happening to their machines to be able to quickly respond and remediate if an incident happens.

Using a healthcare analogy, Lim added that doctors say prevention is better than a cure. “In the IT context before you can even prevent you need to have the visibility, and that is why Tanium is looking at visibility”.

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Once you have the visibility (of your IT infrastructure), you can control what is happening which is similar to prevention, “no matter how much visibility you have things still happen, but when it does you must be able to remediate it immediately”, he said.

Tanium provides three things which can help the Singapore healthcare sector: real-time visibility of IT systems; control over the systems; and remediation tools in case something goes wrong.