We are thrilled to announce that “The Forrester New Wave™: Connected Medical Device Security, Q2 2020” is now live. This report will help you understand how the top eight vendors in the emerging medical device security space stack up against 10 different criteria. We looked at product functionality and vendor strategy through live demos and spoke with reference customers to gain perspectives on how each product prevents, detects, and responds to medical device attacks.

A few key insights:

  1. Providers vary on their ability to support clinical use cases. Some vendors focused solely on medical internet-of-things (IoT) use cases, while others were more broad and covered all types of enterprise IoT devices. Though all vendors in the study had medical-device-specific capabilities, the breadth and depth of device identification and analysis varied. In fact, some references noted that they were only using the vendor for device inventories of their clinical engineering environment, leaving more advanced security analysis use cases off the table.
  2. Device identification is a key differentiator. Accurate device identification across the broadest range of devices helps reduce the burden on security staff looking for complete visibility into their clinical engineering networks. Vendors’ ability to identify accurately a wide range of devices stood out as an important differentiator.
  3. Customer references found value in centrally managed solutions. Across the board, customer references paid special attention to the speed and ease with which their chosen security product was deployed. One hospital we spoke to spent over two years deploying its solution. While many were hesitant to go with a software-as-a-service-based solution due to privacy concerns, those who did found the speed and ease of deployment to be key benefits. Additionally, references appreciated when vendors gave them increased training and support, especially for professionals without a security background.

Given the growing concerns from healthcare providers about medical device security, this evaluation can help security professionals and clinical engineers select the right partner for their medical device security needs going forward.