Your practice faces potential threats to IT security every day from cyberattacks to natural disasters to IT misconfigurations. You need to be ready for any potential risk to your operations and patient records. But how do you even start protecting your practice? The answer is to perform a self-assessment of your current IT security system. This will give you all the information you need to strengthen your security measures. Follow our step-by-step guide and learn everything you need to keep your practice safe.
Identify and Prioritize Your Assets
First, create a list of all the physical and logical assets needed to make your practice run. This will give you an idea of the scope of your IT security assessment and help reveal technology gaps. Once you have an inventory of your assets you can begin prioritizing which ones need protecting first. This is done by looking at how much your practice would suffer if a certain asset wasn’t working. By organizing all your assets into an inventory, you make it easier to conduct the rest of your IT security assessment and prioritize protective steps later on.
Identify Threats
Now that you have identified all the crucial equipment and systems for your practice it’s time to identify potential threats to them. Sadly, there is a lot that could go wrong and wreak havoc on your facility. Learning about the most common threats is the best way to prepare for potential disasters without wasting time. Malware, phishing attacks, distributed denial-of-service attacks, and natural disasters can all bring your practice to a complete halt if proper IT security measures aren’t taken.
Discovering all these possible threats can be overwhelming and you may even feel compelled to take immediate action. Hold off on doing so until your entire assessment is completed. Once you’ve gone through every aspect of your practice you will have a better idea of what actually needs immediate attention. However, if you want to learn more about cybersecurity threats and how to protect against them check out our previous blog on just that topic.
Find Vulnerabilities
After you understand potential threats, you will also want to search your practice for any vulnerabilities that make it easy for cyberattacks to succeed and steal your information. These can be anything from weak passwords to out of date software to lack of user authentication. There are plenty of ways to find these weaknesses in your IT security plan. Penetration testing, security analyses, and automated vulnerability scanning tools are all great options to do so.
Strategy IT also offers our own IT self-audit for you to measure your practice’s level of cybersecurity and suggest the next steps you could take for improvement. And that’s exactly what identifying vulnerabilities is meant to do: show you the weakest areas in your IT security system so you can make them stronger.
Calculate the Likelihood and Impact of Potential Risks
Now that you understand threats and vulnerabilities to your practice, you’re ready to evaluate potential risks. These scenarios are made of a threat exploiting a vulnerability and the consequences that will have on your facility. Perform an impact analysis for every risk. This should include what the impacted system does for your practice, how important it is, and how sensitive its data is. It’s also important to factor in how likely a risk is to happen. These are all crucial determinants for how to prepare for each potential risk and in which order.
Prioritize Risks
Before you prioritize the risks that could impact your practice, you need to decide what your risk tolerance level is. This is determined by which systems you can and cannot function without and for how long. From there you can evaluate each risk based on its impact on your practice, the likeliness of it getting exploited, and how easy a repair or protective measures would be. Ordering potential risks in this way provides you with a clear set of steps to improve your IT security measures and prevent both excessive downtime and a ruined reputation.
Monitor and Document Results
Just because you have a list of potential risks and are working to better your IT security plan, doesn’t mean you’re done with the self-assessment. Ensuring the safety of your practice is an ongoing process, which means your assessment will need to be repeated regularly and updated as new threats and vulnerabilities arise.
The easiest way to keep track of everything from this guide is to create a document where you can mark down the risk scenario, identification date, existing security controls, current risk level, treatment plan, progress status, and residual risk. Revisit this checklist at least once a year and after any threat breaks through your vulnerabilities. This way you can always make sure your systems are running smoothly, and your IT security plan is the strongest it can be in order to stand up to new risks.
Strengthen Your IT Security with Strategy IT
Strong IT security is a must for all healthcare practices. Cyber threats are on the rise and natural disasters aren’t going away anytime soon. It’s important for your practice to be prepared for the worst, but to do that you first need to know what to watch out for and where your systems are weakest. Conducting a self-assessment like the one outlined in this blog or the free one offered by Strategy IT will show you what aspects of your security plan you need to prioritize so you can make sure you’re using your time wisely.
Self-assessments can be overwhelming enough as it is, but having to then take actions to improve your protection measures can feel impossible. Strategy IT can take care of this so you can focus on what you do best. Book a conversation today and learn how Strategy IT can evaluate your IT security measures and strengthen them, so your practice is always protected.
