Future-proofing healthcare cybersecurity: What every leader should know

Healthcare cybersecurity isn’t just about technology—it’s about people, trust, and the future of care.

Healthcare leaders today are navigating a landscape of escalating cyberthreats and increasing operational complexity. Cybersecurity is not just a technical requirement—it’s essential to building patient trust, ensuring care continuity, and enabling future innovation in healthcare.

At the 2025 Scottsdale Institute CISO Summit, top security leaders gathered to share real stories, big challenges, and practical solutions for keeping patient data safe in a rapidly changing world. As a follow-up, they released a report on the Future-Proofing Healthcare Cybersecurity: AI, Cloud Transformation, and Capabilities for Tomorrow.

Here are a few highlights:

Why cybersecurity matters more than ever

Healthcare is an often-targeted and heavily regulated industry with patient outcomes at stake.

• Cyber threats are evolving fast. AI and cloud transformation are opening new doors for care, but also new risks. Cybercriminals are getting smarter, and healthcare organizations must keep pace to protect sensitive information and help ensure patient safety.
• It’s personal. Healthcare leaders reminded us that every security decision impacts real people—patients, families, and staff. The goal is always to deliver the best care, safely.

What healthcare teams need to know about cybersecurity

1. Collaboration is critical

CEOs, CIOs, and CISOs must work together. Innovation and security go hand-in-hand, and strong partnerships help organizations stay ahead of threats.

2. AI opportunities and challenges

AI can make healthcare smarter and more efficient, but it also introduces new risks. Leaders must ask tough questions about how AI tools use data, how they’re trained, and how to keep them secure.

3. Training and upskilling

Investing in technology is only half of the battle. Staff need ongoing training to use new tools safely and effectively. Creative incentives—like paid training time or career pathways—help teams grow and adapt.

4. Breaking down silos

Legacy structures can slow progress. Integrated teams and cross-functional collaboration are key to finding and fixing vulnerabilities quickly.

5. Third-party risk management

Vendor relationships are more complex than ever. Organizations must raise the bar for vendor assessments, ensure business continuity, and educate users about risks.

6. Resilience and response

Prevention is important, but detection and rapid response are essential. AI-powered tools can help spot suspicious behavior, but human oversight remains crucial.

Patient safety, care continuity, and trust in healthcare depend on getting cybersecurity right

Healthcare organizations face a critical inflection point. Success will require:

• Embracing AI-powered defenses
• Building stronger networks among security professionals
• Accelerating vendor sophistication
• Developing agile incident response protocols

Security-first in action: St. Luke’s Health Network

For St. Luke’s University Health Network, protecting patient data is key to delivering great care. Serving people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey at 13 hospitals and 607 practices, including a number of specialties, it has a sizeable data estate to safeguard.

Succeeding at that vital mission got easier when St. Luke’s reduced its number of security tools and gained dramatically greater visibility into the data it needs to maintain security.

It replaced several third-party security solutions with Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Defender for Office 365, adding to its Microsoft Security solution base for a unified security posture that helps security teams do what they do best: protect St. Luke’s from an ever-evolving threat landscape.

I believe that is likely the first company on the cusp of creating the predictive model that will take us past threat detection and enable threat prevention. That’s why we trust Microsoft.

–David Finkelstein, Chief Information Security Officer, St. Luke’s University Health Network

Let’s build a secure future for healthcare, together

At Microsoft, we’re focused on helping organizations consolidate fragmented security capabilities and apply intelligence to deliver better outcomes. Since launching the Secure Future Initiative (SFI) in November 2023, Microsoft has mobilized the equivalent of more than 34,000 engineers to mitigate risk and improve security for Microsoft and our customers.¹

Guided by three security principles—secure by design, by default, and in operations—we have made measurable progress in the areas of culture, governance, and our six engineering pillars. Still, there is more to do, and teams across the company are working to improve the security of every product, address learnings from every incident, and continuously improve our methods and practices.

Microsoft has been a leader for years in developing AI technologies in accordance with responsible AI principles designed to meet compliance requirements, protect data and systems, and maintain customer trust.

Learn how AI can help fortify healthcare security and compliance

• Download the healthcare security e-book.
• Check out the healthcare security and compliance infographic.
• For insights on how to stay ahead of emerging challenges and threats with AI and security for AI, explore the 2025 AI in Healthcare Decision Brief.
• Explore Microsoft security solutions.
• Follow our cybersecurity updates on Microsoft Security LinkedIn and on X @MSFTSecurity.
• Read the full Scottsdale Institute CISO 2025 Summit report.

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¹ November 2025 Secure Future Initiative progress report, Microsoft

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Source: Microsoft Industry Blog