In today’s increasingly connected healthcare environments, healthcare IoT and connected medical devices, once isolated and standalone, now function as critical nodes in sprawling digital ecosystems. From infusion pumps and patient monitors to imaging systems and ventilators, these devices are essential to clinical workflows yet often operate with outdated software, limited patching options, and minimal native security controls. The result is an expanding and highly sensitive attack surface that, if left unprotected, can expose Protected Health Information (PHI), compromise patient safety, and disrupt life-sustaining care. Delayed threat detection isn’t just an IT problem—it can stall diagnostics, impact treatment outcomes, and bring entire departments offline in minutes.
To meet this challenge head-on, healthcare organizations need more than basic perimeter defenses or retrofitted IT tools—they need a purpose-built solution that understands the unique dynamics of medical environments. That’s where Cylera comes in. Designed specifically for healthcare IoT and connected medical devices, Cylera delivers real-time visibility, continuous risk monitoring, and intelligent threat detection without disrupting clinical operations. It empowers security and clinical engineering teams alike with the insight and automation needed to stay ahead of cyber threats while maintaining uninterrupted patient care.
The Security Challenge of Connected Medical Devices
The healthcare landscape is now saturated with thousands of networked medical devices—from infusion pumps and ventilators to diagnostic imaging machines and remote monitoring tools—all working in tandem to support patient care. Yet many of these devices were never designed with cybersecurity in mind, often running outdated operating systems, lacking encryption, and using proprietary protocols that evade traditional network defenses.
This proliferation creates a sprawling, highly vulnerable attack surface that’s difficult to monitor and even harder to secure. In these environments, delayed threat detection doesn’t just threaten data—it can halt surgeries mid-procedure, disrupt medication delivery, and expose patients to harm by incapacitating the very devices keeping them alive. Without real-time monitoring, healthcare providers remain blind to active threats, giving attackers the time and space to move laterally across clinical networks, compromise additional systems, and trigger cascading failures that jeopardize both patient safety and operational continuity.
Requirements for a Successful Healthcare IoT Security Solution
In healthcare, time isn’t just money—it’s lives. A gap of even a few minutes between threat emergence and detection can give attackers the foothold they need to pivot laterally, compromise mission-critical systems, and manipulate unprotected medical devices. Because these devices often lack endpoint protection and cannot be routinely patched, traditional defenses fall short. The stakes are especially high in connected environments like ICUs or surgical suites, where device uptime directly impacts patient outcomes. In these settings, delayed response isn’t just an operational inconvenience—it’s a clinical risk.
To be effective, a healthcare IoT security solution must provide:
- Comprehensive, real-time visibility into all connected devices, regardless of type, vendor, or location
- Device-specific behavioral baselining that understands clinical intent versus malicious activity
- Continuous, passive monitoring that doesn’t interfere with sensitive devices and operates safely within the constraints of FDA-regulated environments
- Context-aware prioritization that helps teams focus on the most critical threats
- Seamless integration with existing security infrastructure to avoid operational burden
Together, these capabilities enable security teams to move from reactive alert handling to proactive threat mitigation, dramatically reducing dwell time and preserving care continuity when it matters most.
Cylera's Technical Foundation for Real-time Monitoring
Cylera’s real-time monitoring platform is purpose-built for healthcare IT security and IT operations teams who need clinical-grade visibility without disrupting care workflows.
Its architecture leverages passive network monitoring, deep device profiling, and healthcare-aware analytics to deliver precise, actionable insights on IoT and medical device activity. It empowers hospitals to detect security threats early, align response with clinical priorities, and maintain operational continuity across complex healthcare environments.
Discovery and Inventory
The Cylera platform’s healthcare discovery and inventory engine is designed to automatically identify and catalog every connected medical and IoT device within a healthcare organization’s environment, without requiring manual entry or agent installation. Operating at the network level, it continuously scans for new or previously unknown devices, capturing granular information including manufacturer, model, operating system, firmware version, software stack, and FDA classification. This automated process eliminates blind spots and provides a living, real-time snapshot of the entire connected device ecosystem, from radiology equipment and infusion pumps to HVAC systems and nurse call stations.
What sets Cylera apart is its ability to enrich this inventory with healthcare-specific context. Each device is profiled using a proprietary clinical behavior model, allowing teams to understand its intended function, communication pathways, and risk posture relative to its clinical use. For example, the platform can distinguish between a CT scanner in an imaging suite and an anesthesia machine in an operating room—each with unique operational constraints and threat profiles. This contextual intelligence transforms basic device listings into actionable insights that inform both security and clinical engineering strategies.
With continuous visibility in place, IT and security teams can proactively monitor for configuration drift, outdated firmware, unpatched vulnerabilities, or unauthorized device additions. As soon as a device appears on the network—whether it’s newly deployed, moved, or reconnected—Cylera instantly classifies and risk-scores it, enabling organizations to track changes, enforce segmentation policies, and plan remediation with precision. This level of real-time oversight is essential not only for threat detection but also for maintaining compliance with frameworks like HIPAA, NIST, and the HHS CPGs in the US and DSPT and NIS in the UK.
Ultimately, Cylera’s discovery and inventory capabilities empower healthcare organizations to shift from reactive risk management to a continuously informed, proactive security posture. This gives teams the visibility they need to protect patients, data, and operations across an increasingly complex digital landscape.
Vulnerability and Risk Management
Cylera’s real-time security monitoring is built to address one of the most pressing challenges in healthcare cybersecurity: separating signal from noise. Traditional monitoring tools often overwhelm healthcare IT teams with floods of alerts, many of which are false positives or lack clinical context. Cylera intelligently filters this noise by leveraging device-specific behavioral baselines, threat intelligence, and contextual analysis to surface only the issues that matter most—those with real exploitability, operational impact, or clinical risk. The result is fewer distractions, faster response, and a more focused security posture that aligns with real-world risk.
A cornerstone of Cylera’s healthcare vulnerability and risk management approach is its prioritized threat assessment, which is grounded in an understanding of the actual attack surface. Rather than treating all vulnerabilities equally, Cylera evaluates factors like device type, role in clinical workflows, connectivity, exploit availability, and compensating controls to assign a context-aware risk score. For example, an unpatched infusion pump on a shared VLAN may receive a higher priority than an identical device on a segmented, monitored subnet. This allows resource-constrained teams to triage and remediate vulnerabilities based on potential patient impact and propagation risk, not just CVSS scores.
The platform also includes a comprehensive vulnerability database that continuously syncs with advisories from the FDA, ICS-CERT, and manufacturers, ensuring real-time awareness of new exposures across the medical device landscape. Each identified vulnerability is linked to affected device models and matched with guidance on mitigations or compensating controls, enabling hospitals to act without delay—even when patching isn’t an option.
With Cylera’s targeted vulnerability insights and dynamic risk modeling, healthcare organizations can shift from reactive fire drills to strategic risk reduction—making meaningful progress toward resilience, even with lean security teams and aging clinical infrastructure.
Threat Detection and Response
Cylera’s threat detection engine is designed with a deep understanding of healthcare IoT environments, enabling it to identify anomalies in real time without overwhelming teams with false positives. By leveraging device-specific behavioral baselines and rich contextual awareness, the platform distinguishes between legitimate clinical activity—such as a ventilator adjusting to a patient’s status—and potential indicators of compromise like unexpected remote connections or irregular protocol usage. This context-driven approach filters out noise while surfacing high-fidelity alerts that require urgent attention, ensuring that response efforts are both timely and accurate.
Once a threat is detected, Cylera’s platform enables real-time, rapid response through automated containment mechanisms and prioritized alert routing. Whether isolating a compromised infusion pump or alerting security staff to abnormal network traffic originating from a diagnostic imaging system, Cylera reduces mean time to containment by ensuring that security teams know exactly where, when, and how to act. Integration with existing SIEM and SOAR platforms further accelerates incident response by embedding Cylera’s clinical and operational context directly into existing workflows.
At the heart of Cylera’s prioritization engine lies machine learning that continuously adapts to new threats and evolving device behavior across clinical environments. Each alert is evaluated against a multi-factor risk model that considers exploitability, potential clinical impact, propagation risk, and device criticality. This ensures that teams don’t just receive alerts—they receive a roadmap, focusing attention on the threats that pose the greatest risk to patient safety and hospital operations.
Ultimately, Cylera empowers healthcare organizations to respond with confidence and clarity, even amid complex, high-pressure situations. Its intelligent threat detection and response capabilities turn what could be a flood of noise into actionable insight—allowing clinical and security teams to move faster, smarter, and more collaboratively in protecting their patients and systems.
Why Traditional Security Falls Short for Healthcare IoT
Traditional security tools—designed for IT systems, not clinical technology—fall short when applied to healthcare IoT environments. They often lack the ability to recognize medical-specific protocols, misinterpret device behavior rooted in clinical workflows, and deliver incomplete visibility into device types, configurations, and operational context.
For example, a standard network monitoring solution might flag a ventilator’s automated response to a patient change as anomalous, while missing subtle lateral movements across surgical imaging equipment. Without a deep understanding of how connected medical devices function and communicate, these solutions generate noisy alerts, overlook genuine threats, and can’t effectively prioritize responses based on patient safety or clinical impact—leaving critical gaps in protection where hospitals are most vulnerable.
Getting Started with Cylera
Getting started with Cylera begins with a focused assessment phase to establish baseline visibility and risk exposure across the healthcare IoT landscape. Healthcare organizations begin by identifying a high-priority clinical area—such as the ICU, radiology, or surgical suite—where medical device density and patient criticality are high. Cylera’s non-invasive network-based deployment allows for real-time discovery of connected devices without disrupting care delivery. During this phase, the platform captures detailed inventory, maps communication patterns, and identifies vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that may otherwise go unnoticed. This initial visibility provides an immediate snapshot of security gaps, giving stakeholders the data needed to prioritize improvements and segment the network where necessary.
Following the assessment, the pilot phase validates Cylera’s value with clear success metrics. Organizations can measure reductions in alert fatigue by tracking the volume and fidelity of IoT-related alerts before and after deployment, while also benchmarking improvements in mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) to critical threats. Based on these results, teams can build stakeholder confidence and define a phased rollout strategy that scales Cylera across the broader environment. The phased rollout strategy also includes aligning with clinical engineering and IT leadership to integrate Cylera insights into existing workflows, configuring policy-driven controls, and leveraging the platform’s reporting tools to support compliance and board-level reporting.
By using a measured, data-driven, and time-tested implementation roadmap, healthcare systems can use Cylera to confidently advance toward a more resilient and responsive IoT security posture.
Conclusion
In a healthcare landscape defined by connectivity and complexity, proactive IoT security is no longer optional—it’s essential to protecting patient safety, ensuring clinical continuity, and safeguarding sensitive data. Cylera rises to meet this challenge with purpose-built, real-time monitoring that gives healthcare organizations the visibility, intelligence, and automation needed to stay ahead of emerging threats without adding operational burden. From rapid device discovery and risk-driven vulnerability management to high-fidelity threat detection and response, Cylera empowers security and clinical teams to act decisively, confidently, and collaboratively.
Ready to secure your connected medical environment? Request a demo and take the first step toward a safer, smarter healthcare IoT strategy.
