Security Audit and Implementation for a Healthcare Platform

Client Background

Our client is a leading healthcare platform, is revolutionizing the hearing care industry by offering the first-ever digitalized hearing care support and products. With a mission to break the stigma surrounding hearing loss, they aim to leverage advanced resources and technologies to ensure seamless continuity of hearing care services. Faced with the challenge of protecting critical customer data and securing their cloud-native production environment, they sought our expertise to conduct a comprehensive security audit and provide robust solutions. They have worked with us previously to reduce their cloud costs, where we helped them achieve significant cost savings. Check our detailed cloud cost optimization case study here.

Customers use both on-premise systems and Google Cloud to run their internal applications that deal with critical customer data.

Challenges

Did you know that the total average cost of insider threat incidents rose from $8.3 million in 2018 to $16.2 million in 2023. (source)

Data is the most important asset for a business. Security threats are increasing day-by-day and not thinking about them would significantly increase the risk of the business. With the rapid growth, the company felt the need of improving the overall security of their on-prem and cloud systems to protect from external and internal threats. Therefore, they wanted to engage a third-party to audit and implement security best practices, customized for the organization.

Concerns Over Customer Data Protection and Access Control: Management was increasingly worried about the protection of their customers' sensitive information. With multiple internal systems and cloud-based applications, it was crucial to identify and manage who had access to this data to prevent unauthorized access and potential breaches.
Absence of Audit and Forensic Capabilities:: The lack of an audit and forensic trail made it difficult to track and analyze past security incidents. Without proper logging and monitoring, the organization had no way to review access history, detect suspicious activities, or conduct thorough investigations when security issues arose.
Lack of Historical Security Audits: The company had never undergone a formal security audit, highlighting a significant gap in their security maturity. This absence of regular assessments meant that vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their security posture remained undetected and unaddressed, increasing the risk of exploitation.
Deficiency in Security Event Monitoring: Operating without security event monitoring was akin to flying blindfolded. The organization lacked the capability to detect and respond to security incidents in real-time. This absence of a proactive monitoring system left them vulnerable to ongoing threats, with no way to mitigate damage promptly or protect against potential breaches effectively.

The Solution

Our approach to addressing these challenges involved the following steps:

Analyzed the data flow across systems to identify gaps.
Strengthening IAM policies and RBAC for Google Cloud and Databases.
Ensured the right backup strategy is in place to store data securely and reliably.
Setup Google cloud logging and alerting.
Enhanced system security by adhering to DISA-STIG guidelines.
Segregated projects to segment access based on the need and responsibility.Reduced the privileges given to the developers and admins to minimum privileges required for their job.
Just-in-time access mechanism to improve trust and create checks for any production level change.
Data-at-rest and data-in-transit encryption, audit logging and forwarding the logs to security projects for further analysis.
Implemented Wazuh - SIEM for threat intelligence, gap analysis with respect to NIST compliance.

Conducted a thorough review of on-premises servers and cloud instances, implemented monitoring tools, and established robust access control protocols. See what we can do for you here.

Tesla recently experienced a major data breach when two former employees leaked nearly 100 gigabytes of confidential information, including personal data of 75,000 individuals, leading to potential GDPR fines of $3.3 billion. (source).

Get an Expert Consultation

Protect your business with our comprehensive security solutions.