I have a unique perspective on healthcare cybersecurity, having spent the beginning of my professional career as a practicing nurse and later moving into cybersecurity consulting. That perspective helps me critically examine the security programs at the many hospitals, physicians and other provider offices that I visit as part of my CDW practice. During conversations with healthcare IT teams, I’ve identified three crucial best practices to protect patient information: vulnerability assessments, penetration tests and incident response playbooks.

Let’s explore each of these critical topics.

Vulnerability scanning, penetration testing and red teaming each play a vital role in an organization’s security program. It’s important that technology leaders understand the different roles they play so they may combine them in the manner most effective for their organizations.

Organizations have long understood the importance of securing their supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks and industrial control systems (ICS) from outside threats.

In recent years, these systems have become increasingly interconnected with IT systems and IoT networks, enabling organizations to take advantage of greater automation and better data analytics. But these improvements make connected systems a bigger target for cybercriminals. Here are three measures organizations should take to assess — and improve — the security measures surrounding their SCADA systems.

As a CDW field solution architect, I work with organizations across numerous industries as they grapple with the complexity of securing cloud computing environments. These environments range from full-scale public cloud deployments to internal private clouds, along with varying degrees of hybrid cloud. But whatever the technology, the security issues remain constant. We work with them to protect their data, applications and infrastructure against a wide range of threats.

Here are some key steps that you can take to secure your own cloud computing deployments.

Many organizations have embraced software-defined innovations such as the software-defined data center and the software-defined WAN, taking advantage of programmability and automation to simplify the management of their networks and other data center resources. What’s been missing, until recently, was a way to achieve the same benefits at the access layer of the network.

Cybersecurity has reached the boardroom. After years of clamoring for attention, the CEOs of U.S.-based corporations told the Conference Board that cybersecurity is their top external concern for 2019, ranking it above economic challenges, trade threats and political instability. Unfortunately, while executives are paying increased attention to security, the message they receive is often unclear….