Oracle Launches Autonomous Shield Initiative to Bolster Healthcare Cybersecurity Amid Growing Ransomware Attacks

Through this initiative, Oracle aims to empower healthcare organizations with state-of-the-art security measures and real-time threat detection capabilities.

In the wake of escalating cyber threats targeting the healthcare industry, Oracle has unveiled its Autonomous Shield initiative—an initiative aimed at fortifying cybersecurity defenses for healthcare organizations.

The healthcare IT giant made the announcement on Tuesday during its first-ever Health Summit in Nashville, where it will be setting up its new headquarters.

The company said the Autonomous Shield initiative will simplify and expedite the migration of Oracle Health Electronic Health Record (EHR) customers to OCI by leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This will incur no additional cost on the part of its healthcare clients.

Through this initiative, Oracle aims to empower healthcare organizations with state-of-the-art security measures and real-time threat detection capabilities, allowing them to focus on their core mission of improving patient outcomes.

Key features of the Autonomous Shield initiative

As per Oracle, some of the key features of the Autonomous Shield initiative include built-in security best practices, solution architecture development, application migration support, access to a team of experts, and go-live assistance.

Oracle's OCI offers automated and effective security measures, including autonomous databases and operating systems that automatically patch and protect against vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of human error and delay.

To protect critical data regarding patients, transaction and business, OCI provides always-on data encryption and on-by-default multi-factor authentication, activity auditing, and DDoS protection.

OCI also helps customers pinpoint potential vulnerabilities and makes timely remediation recommendations to help ensure that essential healthcare systems stay up and running.

The Rise in Cyberattacks in Healthcare:

The Autonomous Shield initiative comes at a critical juncture as the healthcare industry grapples with a surge in cyberattacks.

According to a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), there has been a staggering 239% increase in large breaches involving hacking and a 278% increase in ransomware incidents reported in the past four years.

Recently, the country saw one of the biggest cyber security breaches in the healthcare industry. A ransomware attack on United Health group led to an outage of services and impacted the Change Healthcare payment.

Several critical services used by healthcare providers and pharmacies across the U.S., including payment processing, prescription writing, and insurance claims were impacted.

The organization reported that the cyberattack had caused $872 million in financial damages.

Despite these alarming statistics, healthcare providers allocate only about 8% of their IT budgets to security, highlighting the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures.

Oracle said that it was able to avoid payment disruption on more than $3 billion in claims as it diverted the traffic of several large health networks that used Change Healthcare as a payment gateway to other gateways in a few days of the attack.

Seema Verma, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, underscored Oracle's commitment to prioritizing customer safety in the face of evolving cyber threats.

“Our top priority is helping to keep our customers and their patients safe from the debilitating impacts of cyber-terrorism. With our clinical applications running on OCI, we provide our customers—big and small—with the same military-grade security that is used to protect the most sensitive data at some of the largest and most sophisticated businesses, national defense agencies, and governments around the world,” Verma said.