Strengthening Cyber Defense and Achieving Digital Operational Resilience in Healthcare – Source: securityboulevard.com

Look, we all know cybersecurity is hard. Then you add budget pressures, talent gaps, and operational chaos — it gets even harder. I’ve lived it. I spent over 25 years at MD Anderson Cancer Center, the largest cancer center in the world. I retired recently as CTO.

Our mission was clear: end cancer. But that mission also made us a prime target for adversaries.

My team was responsible for the entire digital infrastructure — across multiple campuses, data centers, 50,000+ employees and contractors, and over 50,000 medical devices. We implemented every piece of technology and made sure it worked at scale.

We had most of the tools you’re probably using today — firewalls, EDRs, NAC, even real-time threat detection and response teams and the list goes on and on.

On paper, we should’ve been secure. But we still felt vulnerable. Not because we lacked tools or alerts — but because threats kept moving.

And when you’re protecting patients, any security failure isn’t just about downtime — it’s about lives.

I’ve seen every kind of threat you can imagine. Zero-days, insider risk, ransomware hiding in places you wouldn’t expect. The stakes? They couldn’t be higher.

That’s when it really hit me: we were thinking about cybersecurity from the wrong perspective.

We’re in asymmetric warfare. The attacker only needs to be right once. We — defenders — need to be right every single time. That’s not a strategy. That’s a liability!

So, what do we do? Security needs to be proactive and think about strengthening resilience. We have to assume compromise — and design for containment.  We stop trusting networks and start isolating them. We stop hoping threats don’t get in — and start ensuring they can’t spread. And you can’t patch your way out of lateral movement. You have to break the path.

This is why microsegmentation matters.  It’s not about chasing threats — it’s about containing them by design. That’s how you survive modern cyber warfare and that’s how you achieve true ‘cyber resilience’—by integrating microsegmentation seamlessly with your existing defenses and enhancing protection.

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Microsegmentation is not new and has been around for years. But one of the biggest challenges we encountered was deploying traditional or hardware-based segmentation technologies at scale. It was not only too complex, but required resources with skills in networking, compute and firewall – which is a rare combination to find.

My first reaction when I saw ColorTokens was that this is ‘too good to be true’ and was very skeptical on how it would work beyond a vendor-controlled demo. However, to ColorTokens’ credit, they proved to us in one of our most complex environments that a software assisted segmentation solution can actually work!

ColorTokens’ Breach Ready microsegmentation platform, Xshield^TM, uniquely provides pervasive microsegmentation across your entire environment, from data centers and cloud platforms to legacy systems, operational technology, IoMT devices, and clinical applications. The platform also helps your organization meet evolving compliance requirements like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and federal guidelines on network segmentation.

The implementation is rapid, ROI is immediate, and you’ll gain complete visibility into your entire ecosystem—from billing systems to critical care units—all through a single pane of glass in minutes, not days or months.

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This has been made possible because of the technological innovations and breakthroughs that ColorTokens has made in the last few years. That’s one reason I decided to join them as an Advisor after I retired from MD Anderson.

You might be facing the same challenges I did. But you don’t have to do it alone — there is a path forward. I chose to work with ColorTokens because their platform finally gets it right.

If you’re serious about protecting what matters, it’s time to rethink your security strategy.

To know more about how ColorTokens can help you achieve digital operational resilience to ensure uninterrupted clinical and business operations, reach out to us here.