Healthcare IT leaders lack confidence in cyber containment

Nile has published a survey of more than 300 global healthcare IT leaders on network security and operations, with findings that point to low confidence in the sector's ability to contain cyber incidents.

Only 20% of respondents said they were confident their network could contain a cyber incident once it entered their environment. By contrast, 61% said they were not confident or only slightly confident. The survey included IT leaders, C-suite executives, and network and security practitioners in healthcare.

The results also show a sector dealing with regular disruption. About 85% of organisations said they frequently experience network or security incidents, and 38% said those incidents affect them at least weekly.

In healthcare settings, such outages can affect systems tied to electronic health records, patient monitoring, imaging workflows, and connected care. The survey describes networks spread across hospitals, outpatient clinics, imaging centres, and remote sites, with large numbers of connected medical and internet-of-things devices sharing infrastructure with core clinical systems.

Containment gap

A central concern in the data is the ability to limit the spread of an attack after an initial breach. Many healthcare environments include devices that cannot easily be patched or do not support security agents, complicating efforts to isolate compromised systems.

Continuous visibility also remains limited. Only 12% of respondents said they monitor their network security posture continuously, the lowest-scoring operational measure in the research. Around a third said they review their posture only after an incident or an audit.

That suggests many teams remain reactive rather than preventive in how they manage security risk. It also helps explain why confidence in containment remains weak, even though cyber threats and ransomware ranked as the top network challenge for 27% of respondents.

Staffing pressures add to the strain. About 66% of healthcare IT teams described themselves as strained or firefighting, while only 18% said they were comfortably managing network operations.

Even among teams that considered themselves fully staffed, more respondents reported constant firefighting than said they were comfortably on top of workloads. This points to environmental complexity, rather than headcount alone, as a major source of operational pressure.

Operational burden

The research puts cyber security ahead of several other long-running concerns in healthcare technology. After cyber threats and ransomware, respondents cited staffing shortages and lack of expertise, rising operational and compliance costs, network reliability affecting clinical systems, and ageing or fragmented infrastructure.

Those issues are closely linked. Complex networks with older infrastructure and diverse device estates can be harder to segment, monitor, and maintain, particularly when IT teams have limited time and resources.

Zero Trust adoption also remains uneven. Only 38% of organisations reported partial or full implementation, while 26% said they were aware of Zero Trust but had no concrete plans.

That matters because segmentation is often seen as one of the main ways to contain attacks in mixed environments that include medical equipment, clinician devices, administrative systems, and guest access networks. Without those controls, a breach in one part of the network may be harder to confine.

The findings reflect broader concerns in healthcare about technology estates that have expanded faster than security architecture and operating models have adapted. Hospitals and health systems now depend on networks for clinical access, connected devices, and administrative work, making downtime and breach containment more immediate operational risks.

The survey found that 64% of healthcare organisations are open to adopting a network-as-a-service model, while 20% of respondents in more mature groups now treat AI-driven automation as essential to running their networks. Nile presented this as evidence that healthcare providers are looking for ways to reduce operational burden while tightening security controls.

Shashi Kiran, Chief Marketing Officer at Nile, said the pressure on healthcare networks now extends beyond technical performance into patient care and privacy.

"In healthcare, the network is the lifeblood of patient care - when it falters, both patient care and patient privacy are put at risk," said Shashi Kiran, Chief Marketing Officer at Nile.

He said the survey shows several problems are converging at once for healthcare IT teams.

"This report shows that these challenges are no longer separate problems to be solved independently; they are deeply interconnected. Healthcare needs a new architectural philosophy, where security and simplicity are built in, and where lean IT teams can focus on patient care rather than daily firefighting," Kiran said.