Threat actors often target medical data as it is worth a lot of money on the dark web. Since many healthcare organizations still rely on outdated network security, they are easy prey even for low-skilled hackers.
However, threats also come from the inside through accidental data mismanagement. Even if your external security defenses work well, employees can still leak sensitive patient data by pasting it into unauthorized AI tools or unmanaged apps. Zero-trust solutions are the answer to these risks.
What does zero trust in healthcare help with? It seals systems against unsupervised access and limits the total attack surface. This guide will walk you through the benefits of zero trust and explain how to apply it to your organization.
The zero-trust concept is based on a simple approach: “never trust, always verify.” It discards the outdated notion of a network perimeter, in which a user logs in once and is trusted to roam freely around the entire network for the rest of the session.
In practice, this concept is implemented using the zero-trust architecture (ZTA). This modern framework protects your systems by enforcing 3 basic rules:
Essentially, any piece of information can be securely retrieved from any location using any device—as long as you can prove exactly who you are. This makes zero trust the perfect approach for hybrid and remote work.
In 2025, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, the healthcare industry was the most targeted sector for the 14th consecutive year, with a single incident costing an average of $7.42 million. This figure is 67% higher than the global average for all other industries, which is $4.44 million.
The majority of data breaches originate from supply chain vulnerabilities, ransomware attacks, and third parties. Here are a few of the biggest breaches from 2025:
Mitigating cyber risks and protecting your sensitive data from unauthorized access are the 2 main benefits of zero trust. Let’s take a look at how it enhances healthcare organizations’ network security.
ZTA implementation facilitates compliance with HIPAA’s strict data privacy rules by providing technical safeguards for Protected Health Information (PHI), no matter how it is accessed and by whom.
To comply with HIPAA, organizations must protect patient data throughout its entire lifecycle using:
Many IT administrators tie the data's security to the medium where it's hosted. While it's not a mistake by default, this can backfire if the access rights are overlooked. ZTA facilitates data protection by linking it to access permissions. That way, with the right credentials, the data can be accessed from anywhere, provided that the user has the right credentials.
On the other hand, this doesn't mean that the medium shouldn't be protected. The idea is that the data should always be inaccessible to everyone, regardless of where it's hosted.
The team in ZTA architecture is regarded as a subset of employees in terms of their access rights. Colleagues share workloads and access the same applications with similar permission levels. They should be restricted only to what is required to perform their role.
This prevents lateral movement, which hackers exploit when escalating privileges to obtain more confidential data. Each workload has specific access restrictions that cannot be bypassed, which helps to manage your traffic load and ensure security in case a data breach occurs.
Zero trust requires every user on the network to be identified. While this doesn't sound too different from a perimeter-based approach, Zero Trust requires identification at each access step. If you've already passed authentication and were allowed into your company's network, this doesn't mean application access is also allowed.
Depending on the ZTA setup, you may be asked to provide separate credentials for the applications or resources you're accessing. Verification can also have multiple steps to increase security against hackers trying passwords from leaked databases.
Another upside of stricter authentication procedures is that every device on the network can be easily identified. This provides much better network visibility, making it easier for network administrators to supervise everything remotely.
In addition, it makes it possible to use various network analysis tools to detect suspicious behavior.
Healthcare systems are vulnerable to breaches because of a large number of connected equipment and medical devices. 2025 was another brutal year for patient data. For example, a data breach at Connecticut’s Yale New Haven Health, mentioned earlier, affected over 5 million people and their PII. One of the best defenses against such breaches is zero trust.
In a zero-trust network access, the network is used only as a gateway to reach specific work-related applications. Users are allowed to access them only after being authorized and authenticated. This creates a barrier that separates the users who are allowed from those who are denied access and reduces the attack surface.
Connected medical devices are an essential part of modern patient care, but at the same time, they often lack built-in security features and are often unmanaged. Traditional endpoint security is not enough. However, a zero-trust approach protects these devices using 4 key components without disrupting patient care:
Changes to your network architecture can be a headache, so it's best to have a thorough action plan for its implementation. Here's how you could approach Zero Trust implementation in your company.
Software-defined perimeter (SDP) is a cybersecurity approach that hides all internet-connected infrastructure from the public. Without authorization, all connected devices remain invisible to hackers scanning for open ports that could serve as a gateway into the company. Limited visibility on public networks serves as a safety mechanism.
If it can be set up, your connections shouldn't always be routed through the central gateway. This only accumulates traffic backhauls, which can quickly add up, causing network congestion. A good solution in such a case is a mesh VPN that uses peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to form connections through peers. That way, you're always connecting through other devices instead of channeling everything through a single tunnel. They're cheaper and easier to scale.
Network access control (NAC) assesses each device before allowing it on the network. This tool enhances your cybersecurity flow by continuously monitoring incoming connections and handling authentication.
Various security policies can be set up depending on the accessed resource sensitivity, the used device, and other parameters. This allows greater flexibility, increasing strictness in certain contexts while being more laid back in others.
In most business settings, introducing any IT changes can be difficult. Here are the major challenges you'll hear when talking about introducing zero-trust architecture.
Healthcare is an industry with one of the highest numbers of connected devices. Most clinical procedures nowadays rely on several medical and IoT devices that instantly sync data to medical databases and your physician's hardware. It's hard to keep up with various security patches and install them on time.
As an IT administrator, you must know precisely what is on your network. Otherwise, you're turning a blind eye to the majority of threats that could be lurking. Without proper knowledge of what exists on your network, it's much harder to protect it.
Usually, for healthcare organizations, safety comes second. Much more important is that all devices should work. Patches or transitions into a new network type can disrupt a sensitive ecosystem, and some devices might start returning errors.
This adds pressure to the IT administrators as they have to plan the transition so that there are no flaws. It's the best idea in such cases to start the transition to ZTA by gradually phasing out the most threatening risks.
There is no universal scalable enforcement technology that could be adapted throughout the company. Your administrators will likely rely on internal segmentation, distributed firewalls, or NAC systems. Still, their effectiveness will depend on your configuration more than on some other mechanisms. They won't be very straightforward, either.
It doesn’t help that IT budgets are often an afterthought in most companies. According to Gartner, only 7.9% of the budget is allocated to IT. If it isn't broken, don't fix it approach has long served as a justification for why additional investments shouldn't be made.
In addition, zero-trust implementation requires additional work hours, strategy, and fine-tuning to yield the desired results. By definition, it's an expensive and lengthy process. Seeing how budgets for IT aren't that high for most companies, the lack of resources might be a key reason holding the company back.
NordLayer is a security service edge (SSE) platform that brings healthcare cybersecurity solutions based on the zero-trust model. No matter the size of your organization—from small clinics to large hospital networks—NordLayer can help enhance your security.
One of NordLayer’s primary use cases is secure remote access from off-site locations. By enforcing strict authentication and authorization protocols, the platform ensures that critical medical resources, Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and internal networks are secured—regardless of where your staff is logging in from. Because the solution is fully cloud-based and software-only, it eliminates the need for expensive, complicated hardware deployments, allowing your IT team to manage everything from a single, web-based Control Panel.
Beyond secure access, NordLayer enables healthcare organizations to easily implement network segmentation, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive patient data. It is an agile, easy-to-deploy solution that scales effortlessly as your business needs evolve.
Want to protect your data without slowing down your staff? Get in touch with our team to discover how our zero-trust approach can elevate your organization’s cybersecurity.
Joanna Krysińska
Senior Copywriter
Joanna's family has a history in math and engineering, and she has dedicated her life to simplifying complicated technical ideas. She helps people understand how hackers think and how to stay ahead of them by concentrating on the human side of cybersecurity.
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