Risks & Benefits of Biometrics in Security
This post covers the impact of biometric authentication on security and discusses the benefits and risks of biometrics in security.
Each layer—identity, endpoint, cloud, application, network, compliance—needs its own specialized solution. You need tools that do one job and do it right: control access, spot intrusions fast, block lateral movement, detect misconfigurations, and prove compliance without the hand-waving.
This guide breaks down the essential components of a serious healthcare security stack. We’ve mapped each category to tools picked for their technical depth, HIPAA and HITRUST alignment, and real-world performance. Whether you're locking down a healthtech startup or tightening an existing setup, this is the stack you build if you’re serious about stopping breaches and passing audits.
At Software Secured, we manually hack healthcare apps for a living. Our team works with fast-moving healthtech companies to uncover real risks, not checkbox findings. One client put it best: “Software Secured successfully completed the penetration test and provided a clear report with the next steps. The team was responsive and thorough, and they delivered work on time despite the aggressive timeline. Overall, Software Secured was professional and went above and beyond expectations.”
A piecemeal approach to healthcare security doesn’t work. Buying one tool for each audit gap leads to a fragmented mess—overlapping features, blind spots, and wasted spend. Worse, it gives a false sense of protection. Real security comes from a coordinated, layered stack designed to stop real attacks.
According to the Medical Group Management Association: “If you are relying on a single layer, you are asking for trouble”
If you're relying on a single security tool, you're asking for trouble. No one tool can stop every attack; layered security gives you multiple opportunities to catch a threat before it causes damage.
Passing HIPAA or HITRUST doesn’t mean you’re safe. Attackers don’t care about your compliance badges—they look for weak access controls, outdated endpoints, and unpatched web apps. You need overlapping defenses that catch what others miss.
Security tools that don’t talk to each other leave gaps. Alerts get buried, coverage overlaps, and teams waste time. The right stack shares context—so your EDR knows what your firewall sees, and your pentest findings feed into your SIEM.
Connected devices, patient portals, EHR integrations—these aren’t covered by off-the-shelf tools. You need solutions built for the way healthcare actually works.
Healthcare security isn’t a grab-bag of tools—it’s a carefully architected stack. Each layer must solve a specific risk vector, feed context into the next, and serve healthcare’s strict HIPAA/HITRUST audit demands. Below is a tight stack of tools built for healthcare: from pentesting to vulnerability management to EDR, identity, network, and SIEM/SOAR—vendors chosen for real-world coverage, integration capability, and compliance focus.
Penetration testing is the most direct way to identify potential vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. For healthcare organizations, it’s not just a best practice—it’s mandated by HIPAA and expected in HITRUST assessments. But not all pentests are equal. In healthcare, testing must go beyond surface-level scans to simulate real attacks against APIs, cloud infrastructure, EHRs, and connected devices.
Software Secured specializes in high-assurance, manual penetration testing with a strong track record in healthcare, thanks to their test plan targeted specifically towards Healthcare applications Unlike PTaaS vendors that automate or crowdsource, Software Secured pairs each client with a dedicated offensive security team that works closely with internal developers and compliance leads.
With deep experience in HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 environments, the company goes beyond basic vulnerability discovery to help teams understand root causes, prioritize remediation, and align fixes with real business risk. For fast-moving healthtech startups and mid-sized providers, Software Secured helps avoid false positives, wasted cycles, and audit pain.
Pricing is scoped based on attack surface size, complexity, and frequency, delivered as a project or subscription model. However, external network pentests start from $5400, and authenticated web application pentests from $10k.
Ideal for digital health startups and SMBs that need deep coverage, compliance-aligned results, and support beyond just finding issues. Also works well for orgs prepping for HITRUST or enterprise due diligence.
Public starter packages: Small $8,500, Medium $13,600, Large $20,400; larger programs use a credit model.
Healthcare startups and digital-health vendors needing fast, budgetable web/API/LLM tests with audit-ready outputs and ticket-driven remediation
Quote-based; no public list pricing. AWS Marketplace lists contract-driven terms and private offers.
Mid-market to enterprise healthcare providers, payers, and digital-health platforms that want PTaaS with named in-house testers, LLM coverage, and tight integration into ticketing and release workflows.
Identity & Access Management (IAM) ensures the right clinicians, staff, vendors, and workloads get the right access to the right systems—only when they need it. By combining SSO, phishing-resistant MFA, automated provisioning, and just-in-time privileged access, IAM enforces least privilege across EHRs, cloud apps, and medical devices. For healthcare, strong IAM protects PHI, reduces account-takeover and ransomware risk, and preserves clinical workflows (e.g., fast, secure access during shifts and emergencies). It also provides the audit trails and policy controls needed to demonstrate HIPAA compliance and satisfy security reviews from partners and regulators.
Licensed per user; Microsoft publishes public pricing. P1 includes Conditional Access and basic governance; P2 adds Identity Protection and PIM.
Organizations already using Microsoft 365 or Azure that want turnkey identity management, advanced security controls, and tight integration with Microsoft’s security stack.
Okta Workforce Identity Cloud delivers a flexible, vendor-neutral identity platform ideal for healthcare organizations operating across mixed technology stacks. It provides secure single sign-on (SSO), adaptive MFA, and advanced lifecycle automation, backed by one of the industry’s largest application integration catalogs.
Per-user suite licensing (Starter, Essentials, Pro, Enterprise), with Workflows and Lifecycle features scaling by tier; HIPAA cell pricing is custom.
Healthcare providers and digital health platforms needing flexible IAM for diverse environments and HIPAA-aligned identity solutions.
Endpoint security (EDR/XDR) is critical because endpoints—clinician laptops, shared workstations, and connected devices—are the easiest path to PHI and the fastest way attackers move laterally. EDR/XDR provide continuous telemetry and behavior-based detection to catch credential theft, ransomware staging, and data exfiltration in real time. They also automate containment (isolate a host, kill a process, roll back changes) to shrink blast radius and downtime for clinical apps. Finally, the alerting and audit trails help meet HIPAA expectations for incident detection, response, and reporting.
CrowdStrike Falcon is a cloud-native endpoint detection and response (EDR/XDR) platform designed for high-accuracy threat prevention, detection, and hunting across clinical workstations, shared endpoints, and IoT/IoMT devices. Its single lightweight agent captures telemetry from endpoint, identity, and cloud activity, correlating signals to detect ransomware, credential theft, and stealthy lateral movement.
Quote-based per-endpoint subscription; bundles vary by modules included.
Healthcare organizations needing enterprise-grade endpoint visibility, proactive threat hunting, and MDR capabilities to protect critical clinical systems and patient data.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) delivers enterprise-grade endpoint detection and response (EDR) tightly integrated with Microsoft 365 and Azure ecosystems. For healthcare organizations, it provides continuous telemetry, automated investigation, and real-time remediation to protect clinician workstations, shared devices, and medical IoT endpoints from ransomware, credential theft, and lateral movement.
Available as part of Microsoft 365 E5 or as a standalone license; feature set varies by plan.
Healthcare organizations standardized on Microsoft 365 that want unified endpoint, identity, and email security with minimal vendor sprawl.
Network Security for healthcare pairs next-generation firewalls (NGFW) with IDS/IPS to control traffic from Layer 3–7, decrypt and inspect TLS, and block known exploits as well as suspicious behaviors. In hospitals and healthtech environments, these controls segment EHR/PACS, clinical, admin, and guest networks; quarantine unmanaged medical/IoT devices; and enforce secure remote access. The result is a smaller blast radius for phishing-led intrusions and ransomware, prevention of PHI exfiltration, and earlier detection of lateral movement in otherwise flat or legacy networks. Detailed logging and policy baselines also support HIPAA risk management and partner security reviews without slowing clinical workflows.
Palo Alto’s PA-Series firewalls offer deep visibility, real-time threat blocking, and zero-trust enforcement across complex healthcare networks. Unlike legacy firewalls, the PA-Series uses machine learning to stop unknown threats inline and inspects traffic based on application and user, not just IP or port.
Quote-based; ranges from ~$1K for entry models to $200K+ for enterprise chassis.
Hospitals and multi-site healthcare organizations that need full visibility, strict control, and enterprise-grade enforcement at the network edge.
FortiGate puts a high-performance next-gen firewall at your perimeter and branches, backed by FortiGuard AI‑powered protection bundles. Designed for real-world threats, this combo inspects everything from packet payloads to URLs—blocking attacks without slowing down clinical workflows.
Subscription-based: base firewall hardware plus FortiCare support and UTP (or higher) bundles; firewall hardware for SMBs runs from ~$700–$4,000, UTP renewal ~$9,000–$12,000 over 3 years
Healthcare networks from mid-sized clinics to large hospitals needing performance, rich protections, IoT-aware filtering, and a unified, high-assurance network defense.
Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) centralizes and correlates logs from across your stack to detect threats, investigate timelines, and prove what happened. Security Orchestration, Automation & Response (SOAR) turns those detections into repeatable playbooks—automating triage, enrichment, and containment to cut mean time to respond. In healthcare, SIEM+SOAR unify signals from EHR/PACS, NGFW/EDR, IAM, and cloud services to catch ransomware, account takeover, and insider misuse without slowing clinical workflows. They also generate audit-ready evidence (retention, case management, access trails) that supports HIPAA risk management and partner security reviews.
Microsoft Sentinel fuses SIEM and SOAR in one cloud-native platform—ingesting logs, hunting threats, and automating responses across multicloud and on-prem systems. It uses AI, threat intel, and automation playbooks to cut analyst workload and expose what others miss.
You pay per ingested GB (pay-as-you-go) or commit to daily capacity—a flat cost up to ~65% cheaper
Cloud-first healthcare orgs with Azure footprints—like healthtech startups or mid-tier providers—who need threat visibility, compliance-ready logging, and automated incident playbooks in one scalable solution.
Sumo Logic delivers a cloud-native SIEM paired with Cloud SOAR to give healthcare organizations rapid, scalable threat detection and response without on-premises overhead. The SIEM normalizes and correlates logs from EHR systems, medical IoT, cloud workloads, and traditional security tools, surfacing high-fidelity alerts via entity-based analytics. Prebuilt content packs map directly to HIPAA, HITRUST, and PCI DSS requirements, accelerating compliance readiness.
Subscription-based, driven by daily ingest volume (SIEM) and automation usage (SOAR).
Healthcare providers and digital health firms needing rapid deployment, automated incident response, and strong compliance alignment.
Vulnerability Management is the continuous process of discovering assets, assessing them for CVEs and misconfigurations, prioritizing by real-world exploitability, and driving remediation through patches or configuration changes. In healthcare, it shrinks the attack surface that ransomware and account takeover use to reach EHRs and PHI, and helps mitigate risks on legacy systems and medical/IoT devices where patching can be tricky. Effective programs pair authenticated scanning with agents and cloud connectors, push fixes via ITSM/patch tools, and track coverage/MTTR. The resulting evidence supports HIPAA risk analysis/management and strengthens partner security reviews.
Subscription-based, quote upon request; scales based on number of assets.
Organizations needing a unified vulnerability management solution with real-time detection, automated response, and compliance capabilities—especially in hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
SafeBreach delivers a continuous breach-and-attack simulation (BAS) platform that safely runs thousands of real-world attack scenarios across your network and cloud environments. Purpose-built to uncover where your defenses fail, it offers both Validate (simulations of actual TTPs) and Propagate (attack-path validation), combining proactive testing with attack impact analysis to give security teams a clear, business-centric view of risk.
Quote-based, varies by deployment size and scope—includes fully managed service tiers.
Enterprises and healthcare providers that want proactive, data-driven validation of defense controls—especially useful for compliance, M&A due diligence, and aligning security investments with actual risk posture.
Software Secured provides the foundational validation layer that proves your controls actually work against real attackers. Our manual penetration testing pressure-tests the stack end-to-end: we verify NGFW segmentation and IDS/IPS policies stop lateral movement, confirm SIEM detections and SOAR playbooks trigger at the right moments, challenge IAM (MFA, Conditional Access, JIT/PIM) to prevent privileged misuse, and ensure vulnerability-management closes the risks that matter. Unlike scanners, our testers chain issues across apps, APIs, cloud, and medical/IoT networks to expose business-logic and workflow gaps that automation misses, precisely where PHI is most at risk. We integrate with development workflows and compliance programs: tickets in your backlog, targeted fix guidance, remediation retests, and artifacts mapped to HIPAA/HITRUST/SOC 2. The result is a measurable feedback loop, find, fix, and verify, that hardens defenses, shortens MTTR, and provides audit-ready evidence. In a stack full of automated tools, Software Secured supplies the human adversary perspective that keeps the whole system honest.
A well-architected healthcare security stack delivers more than compliance—it creates a layered, defense-in-depth posture that protects sensitive patient data, critical systems, and care delivery from evolving threats. By integrating the right tools across penetration testing, IAM, endpoint, network, SIEM/SOAR, and vulnerability management, organizations gain visibility, resilience, and faster incident response. The key is not just choosing best-in-class solutions, but ensuring they work together seamlessly. The first step is validating your current posture through thorough, manual penetration testing—identifying real-world risks before attackers do. From there, build and integrate your stack to align with both operational needs and regulatory requirements.
Book a free consultation to assess your healthcare security stack
Sherif Koussa is a cybersecurity expert and entrepreneur with a rich software building and breaking background. In 2006, he founded the OWASP Ottawa Chapter, contributed to WebGoat and OWASP Cheat Sheets, and helped launch SANS/GIAC exams. Today, as CEO of Software Secured, he helps hundreds of SaaS companies continuously ship secure code.
Security
Can be easily manipulated without detection if not properly secured.
Digitally signed and can be validated on the server. Manipulation can be detected.
Size
Limited to 4KB.
Can contain much more data, up to 8KB.
Dependency
Often used for session data on the server-side. The server needs to store the session map.
Contains all the necessary information in the token. Doesn’t need to store data on the server.
Storage Location
Browser cookie jar.
Local storage or client-side cookie.
Securing healthcare systems isn’t about buying one flashy tool—it’s about building a hardened stack, layer by layer. Healthcare organizations deal with exposed APIs, legacy systems, undersecured medical devices, and sensitive patient data that hackers actively target. A generic setup won’t cut it.
Providing the quality of the biggest names in security without the price tag and complications.
Manual penetration testing
Full time Canadian hackers
Remediation support