A study by the Ponemon Institute found that 92% of healthcare organizations experienced at least one cyberattack in 2024. According to HIMSS, phishing remains a leading cause of breaches, while emerging AI tools are enabling new avenues of attack. IT help desks have seen increased use of voice deepfakes and social engineering to impersonate users and gain account access. Cybercriminals can create deepfakes with just three seconds of audio, making strong identity verification policies essential.

Healthcare organizations also face risks from third-party vendors, exacerbated by a lack of visibility into partner environments. The growing number of connected medical devices, which expand the attack surface, is also a concern. Mergers and acquisitions add complexity as organizations acquire legacy infrastructure that limits their ability to manage threats effectively. Modern infrastructure is key to proper integration, visibility and automation in M&A environments. For example, a multicloud approach let organizations segregate information, distribute workloads securely and create rapid recovery environments. These capabilities improve cyber resilience, which is critical for patient care and operational stability.

SECURE THE CLOUD: Knowing how to establish and maintain cybersecurity in cloud environments is a challenge for many organizations, especially those that lack cloud security expertise. Misconfigurations create vulnerabilities that can lead to breaches — for instance, by enabling unauthorized access or disabling essential alerts. A growing concern for healthcare organizations is improper security around Identity authentication and authorization in Active Directory. Cybercriminals increasingly are targeting AD and deleting key backups to prevent organizations from recovering quickly after a breach. Regardless of which type of cloud strategy organizations use, knowing how to protect these environments — and understanding shared responsibility models in cloud environments — is crucial.

Modernizing and optimizing infrastructure requires the right combination of solutions and services, tailored to each healthcare organization’s unique needs.

ASSESSMENTS INFORM STRATEGY: Assessments help business and IT leaders understand their current state versus future-state objectives so they can develop a roadmap forward. For example, CDW’s tool and application rationalizations often identify opportunities to improve the use of existing technologies and thereby simplify IT environments. CDW also helps healthcare organizations plan, design, and implement modernization initiatives that support and accelerate business objectives.

These engagements address cloud migration, optimization strategies, hypervisor selection and other issues. Most important, CDW helps decision-makers think strategically about their investments, asking the right questions to help leaders refine their objectives and understand their options. From there, CDW can help organizations design and deploy modern infrastructure that supports advanced capabilities and best practices for cybersecurity, integration and automation.

RESOLVE STAFFING ISSUES: CDW research found that 45% of IT and security professionals attribute most of their stress to a lack of staff. As healthcare organizations consider staffing options, they should evaluate various activities’ strategic value and workloads. For example, help desks are ideal candidates for managed services. Partners can deliver better service at a lower cost so that organizations can shift those resources elsewhere.

When organizations need to staff highly strategic, specialized roles, such as network architecture roles, engaging professional services often makes sense. As technology has become more complex, many healthcare organizations choose to focus on their core business and use managed services instead of developing internal expertise in cloud, cybersecurity and data analytics.

ENGAGE SECURITY EXPERTISE: A CDW survey of cybersecurity professionals found that three-quarters of organizations outsource some security functions, including managed security, third-party vendor risk management and employee training. Approximately one-quarter of organizations engage experts for help with vulnerability assessments, advisory services, threat hunting and incident response support.

CDW’s cybersecurity experts can help customers identify gaps and vulnerabilities and design modern infrastructures that increase visibility, ease integration challenges and build post-incident recovery capabilities. CDW also provides managed detection and response services that allow internal teams to focus on the most critical issues. CDW’s experts, many of whom have worked in healthcare IT, understand the industry’s unique cybersecurity challenges and tailor their recommendations to each customer’s environment.