37% Health Orgs Shirk Mobile Security for Efficiency, Increasing Risk

Verizon recently released its third annual Mobile Security Index, which revealed 37 percent of healthcare organizations admit to sacrificing mobile security to “get the job done” and have drastically increased the risk of compromise in the process. Researchers from Verizon surveyed 876 professionals tasked with buying, securing, and managing IoT and mobile devices, including those from healthcare. The goal was to provide insights into the mobile device threat landscape and ways organizations are, or are not, protecting data and key systems. Overall, organizations use an average of 1,300 apps and cloud services, and nearly all (95 percent) of those are unmanaged without IT administration rights or visibility. According to the report, awareness and concern about mobile device security has increased across the sector, but not all leaders are ensuring the effectiveness of their security. Thirty-eight percent of healthcare respondents said they faced compromise involving a mobile device last year, a significant increase from 2018 (25 percent).