Protecting your organization is the primary directive for business leaders, and pharmaceutical companies have a lot to be concerned about. The risk from cybercriminals is extensive and growing, with more than 4,000 ransomware attacks happening on a daily basis, according to the FBI. This startling trend is even more frightening when you consider that even organizations as large and sophisticated as Merck & Co. can suffer a global shutdown of operations due to a security breach. See how you can protect your sensitive data and maintain secure operations with advanced cybersecurity countermeasures.
The Cost of Cybercrime
Cybercriminals are responsible for an astounding amount of loss to American businesses, with much of these costs coming in the form of lost productivity, lack of consumer confidence after a breach and the cost of notifying individuals after a breach. Recovering from a cybercrime can be extremely expensive for organizations, especially when you consider the cost of identifying the breach, making any necessary adjustments to your security processes and procedures and then putting safeguards into place to ensure that your data is more secure in the future.
Proactive Data Protection
Client health and financial data is extremely sensitive, and must be treated with the utmost care. With active management, your technology team should be able to quickly identify weaknesses in your processes and procedures — shoring up the support with ongoing training for your team members. When your employees fully understand the scope of the problem around data loss, they are much more likely to abstain from clicking that tempting email. Phishing is a primary attack vector for cybercriminals, as they have seen a great deal of success by creating increasingly complex emails that mimic legitimate correspondence with colleagues and vendors.
Defining a Robust Cybersecurity Posture
While training is a good step, it’s crucial that your technology provider is working with your internal team to actively manage your cybersecurity posture. This could include:
- Active monitoring of your network activity
- Spam control at the server level, before emails are delivered to users
- Proactive backup and recovery procedures
- Vulnerability assessment
- Compliance reporting
- Management of active data as well as data at rest
- Secure onsite or offsite data storage facilities
- Endpoint protection, including security for mobile devices and Internet of Things devices
With a pharmaceutical company, there’s the added concern with having intellectual property available that cybercriminals may be able to access. Protecting this lucrative information is a primary consideration for technology teams.
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
With more pharmaceutical organizations looking for ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) in their work, it’s possible this could open additional vulnerabilities for the business. The massive amounts of data that can be mined from patient records and used to simulate results on a broad scale have exciting potentials for AI and machine learning. Unfortunately, the aggregation of this high-value data is likely to tempt cybercriminals to attack pharmaceutical companies on a broader scale than ever before.
Protecting your data may be job one, but it’s probably not the only consideration for your internal teams. At Coretelligent, we work closely with life sciences and other organizations to create a secure infrastructure that will protect your organization — and the data of your key constituents. Contact us today at 855-841-5888 or via email to info@coretelligent.com for more information.
