Healthcare Cyber Security Company of the Year – UK

An ‘Internet of Things’ platform that allows medical facilities to perform at peak efficiency without fear of cyber-attack, Cylera offers defence and synergy in a holistic fashion. Having worked hard to develop the best solution in the UK for remote, digital, and top-down medical device management in a way that doesn’t interfere with uptime or leave the facility open to infiltration, clients from large hospitals and small local health centres alike have lauded Cylera as an invaluable part of keeping the medical machine – both technologically and metaphorically – running smoothly.

Cylera, an industry leader when it comes to next-generation IT, IoMT, and OT cybersecurity, has been making a name for itself across the industry vertical with its hard-working team and exemplary solutions. Nominally, it has been developed to provide the strongest, most advanced, and most reliable healthcare Internet of Things solutions, alongside the best cybersecurity risk management solutions for the industry, especially when it comes to the defence of medical devices. Its focus on healthcare has certainly made it a front-runner, able to give clients peace of mind that the technology they use to help their patients is secure. Fundamentally, the Cylera platform through which these solutions are delivered ensures the strongest and most advanced IoT work is made available to its clients, discovering and securing the entire connected environment across an enterprise’s technological infrastructure.

Covering the overall structure, the medical devices found therein, and the building operations systems of a client’s facility, Cylera’s platform has been built for IT and clinical engineering both. Thus, it covers asset identification and management, network analysis, risk assessment, network segmentation, threat detection, intelligence, operational analytics and fleet optimisation, and has become well known for its excellence in each of these facets of its work, becoming a trusted provider of NHS trusts across the UK. Whether its clients specialise in acute, community, or mental health, Cylera’s technology enables it to stay focused on the patients, helping it to keep its medical devices cyber-safe and operational. This is something that its clients often mention in reviews.

Critically, its customers can trust the level of diligence and expertise that goes into the development of each and every one of its services, as well as its dedication to keeping its finger on the pulse of new developments and innovations in its industry so that it can remain staunchly competitive. Having seen significant growth in the market whilst keeping an eye on the trends therein, it has noted a prevailing spike in growth that began in the early months of 2021. Here, many NHS trusts flocked to Cylera for new and better cybersecurity solutions to help them handle the brunt of the oncoming challenges, benefitting hugely from the resulting increased security in their medical devices and healthcare infrastructure, meaning they have one less thing to worry about in an era of ever-evolving new concerns.

This award, for Cylera, is further proof that it is on the right track with its efforts, especially combined with 2021’s growth spurt. Having made itself a trusted partner to many healthcare providers, the third-party recognition granted by awards such as this signals the start of even more increasingly invaluable growth, ensuring that clients never need to just take its word for it when it comes to the exemplary nature of its services. Instead, they can trust the endorsements given to it by awards committees and previous clients both, able to peruse the various different reviews and referrals it has received over the years. Additionally, due to the industry it works within, many of its clients come to it through word-of-mouth referral by fellow professionals in healthcare.

Furthermore, its focus on healthcare allows it to stand out from its competitors, as it has built itself to specifically fit around the challenges of modern healthcare infrastructure and the requirements involved. Crucially, the specificity of its technology makes it the most reliable IoT service that a medical facility can purchase, the depths of its insights and the understanding of clinical and IT/SOC workflows it is able to display being totally second to none. It is also able to develop unique policy generation, customer collaborated design, and risk-free clinical systems or processes, able to scale this up or down to fit any scale of organisation or facility from the largest hospitals to the smaller, more locally focused practices.

Additionally, many vendors of IoT technology are actually providing re-purposed solutions. Often, these are generalised technological offerings that cannot adequately safeguard uptime, meaning they are unreliable when it comes to critical medical device management, enterprise IoT systems, and specialised healthcare environments, which can be incredibly dangerous should an attack catch a client unawares. These solutions give a ‘theatre of security’ style illusion whilst actually safeguarding nothing.

In contrast to such things, Cylera’s efforts are based around three key technological capabilities, providing the basis of the granular detail that it has been able to incorporate into its highly advanced, specific, and well-developed systems, all of which it is willing to talk a customer through in detail. Firstly, it works hard to incorporate adaptive datatype analysis into itself. This is something that Cylera has been working hard on for many a year, resulting in a patented and proprietary method of identifying IoT devices and extracting data whether known or unknown from the relevant sources, all whilst IoMT are introduced and moved throughout the environment.

Cylera uses this to be able to tell a client far more about the status of the device, where it is, and how it is communicating with other systems; something that many of its competitors either cannot do or do not handle nearly as well. This is further bolstered by its Internet of Things Device Emulation Engine, or ‘Digital Twin’. Regarding this specifically, its patented Device Emulation engine creates digital twin simulations of the live device in the platform itself, allowing accurate configuration and behaviours that keep a close eye on the actual device’s status. Maintained in real time as the device changes and as fluctuations occur in the live environment, Cylera can ensure industry-leading vulnerability scanning without jeopardising device uptime or clinical continuity, ensuring that the medical facility in question can continue to run smoothly.

Third and lastly – but certainly not least – amongst Cylera’s technological capabilities is its Intelligence Database. Cylera’s CyLabs provision is a unique blend of cutting-edge proprietary research into healthcare devices and the cross-industry threats that such healthcare delivery organisations face, benefitting the customer to include an understanding of how risks may affect the business. By implementing software born out of this deep understanding of the wider clinical context, Cylera allows clients to continue their expert delivery of healthcare solutions, giving them invaluable peace of mind that they will have no cybersecurity threats to take away from this such as unpatched devices or ratings without context awareness.

The most recent development in the Cylera platform has recently become the new Cyber Alert Dashboard. Nominally, this has been developed based on the number of specific requests that the business receives on a daily basis, pushing it to respond by rising to the challenge and developing a system specific to the needs of NHS Trust customers. Having shown its diligence, professional acumen, and tenacity when it comes to serving such clientele, the new dashboard highlights whether the Trust has any equipment affected by the NHS Digital Cyber Alert security notifications and guides them on how to resolve or mitigate against each threat, issuing cyber alerts to health and care organisations in order to keep them up to date.

This has, critically, allowed Cylera to develop a kind of ‘early warning system’. From weekly threat bulletins to immediate, high-severity alerts, Cylera’s clients have been benefitting from a new, comprehensive, and holistic answer to cybersecurity awareness, allowing responses to be timely and specific enough to resolve risks before they become threats in the first place. Naturally, this is something that has further increased Cylera’s notoriety in the industry, setting it up as a cornerstone of the modern NHS’s working infrastructure and a critical linchpin between the facilities scattered all over the UK.

Over the last few years, healthcare providers have also become increasingly targeted by sophisticated cyberattacks. This, combined with the ever-evolving threats that cyberattacks can pose, as well as additional pressure put on the medical industry by the pandemic has made the cybersecurity and cyber defence of facilities even more pivotal than ever before. Nominally, many of these attacks directly focus on the connections that medical professionals and devices have to the IoT.

Cylera wishes to make the IoT and solutions therein as safe and secure as possible, not just for specific elements of the medical sector, but for the entire industry vertical across all manner of scales and specific healthcare provisions. Becoming the safeguarding watchdog for networks, access protected data, patient care, and other such services, NHS Digital has continued to make Cylera its core stalwart and defender, helping it to raise the bar for healthcare’s data security requirements. Additionally, it has also been expanding the scope of the identifications and monitoring that connected medical devices can achieve.

As more and more NHS trusts look to adhere to new DSPT standards, Cylera is excited to be serving a new boom in interest in both its platform and the how’s and why’s behind its services, able to show the benefits that a facility can glean by trusting a cybersecurity expert. Moreover, as a constantly developing and tenacious company, it has been able to update its specific capabilities to be perfectly in line with the issues these new customers wish to see resolved or mitigated, for instance being able to provide a map to the majority of DSP toolkit requirements. This aids the acceleration of how quickly NHS clients can prepare their submission, backed up by all relevant evidence needed for validation.

Like many start-ups, it is fully focused on collaboration and achieving a set vision. This – safeguarding what matters most – has made it a true industry darling and a gem in the medical sector throughout the UK, something that will be continuing to be true long into the future. Taking care of the professionals, and by proxy, the patients, Cylera’s efforts ensure that medical facilities can operate quickly, efficiently, and without fear of disruption from outside sources, able to rest assured that even though cyberthreats evolve on a daily basis, so does Cylera.

For business enquiries contact Katherine Brocklehurst via the website – cylera.com