Is healthcare cybersecurity improving – or just giving the illusion of readiness?
Our 2025 Healthcare IT Landscape Report reveals a growing confidence among healthcare leaders – but that optimism may be dangerously misplaced. While 67% of executives say cybersecurity is regularly prioritized, and 80% express confidence in their teams’ ability to handle AI-powered threats, the data tells a different story.
Beneath this confidence lies a widening gap between perception and preparedness.
Our analysis identifies the top four cybersecurity gaps threatening healthcare and life sciences organizations in 2025 – vulnerabilities that, if left unchecked, could lead to prolonged outages, patient data loss, and regulatory penalties.
Despite high confidence among executives, real vulnerabilities continue to threaten healthcare resilience. The following four gaps are creating a dangerous false sense of security across the industry.
Data found that 30% of companies don’t regularly train their teams on how to respond to cyberattacks or data breaches, and nearly half are still not utilizing simulated phishing exercises – one of the most impactful methods for testing employee security awareness. Given that 81% of organizations were breached by an AI-driven social engineering attack last year, training needs to advance to meet the demands of the threat landscape.
Life sciences companies have the least faith in their employees’ ability to identify advanced threats, with more than 13% indicating low or no confidence that users can detect and prevent social engineering attacks.
Nearly a quarter (23%) of organizations admitted it could take up to a month to detect and contain a suspected data breach utilizing their current controls. For life sciences companies, response times are even longer, with 20% saying it could take as long as months to quell the risk.
Further complicating response efforts, 17% of healthcare companies surveyed don’t have a current or effective incident response plan, and 16% say their team is not trained on incident response plans regularly.
Nearly two-thirds (63%) of organizations have an in-house cyber or IT team, but staffing levels and expertise remain a concern for healthcare leaders. Our key findings include:
Forty percent (40%) of organizations indicated they do not currently conduct proactive IT risk assessments, and 18% of those have no plans to do so in the next 12 months! Of those that are periodically assessing vulnerabilities, one in five (20%) do so less than quarterly. Given the rapidly changing threat landscape and complexity of growing attack surfaces, this poses a significant risk to operational integrity across the healthcare sector. Without continuous threat monitoring, cybercriminals can cause significant damage before they’re even detected.
These challenges won’t be solved overnight. With limited internal resources, understaffed IT teams, and insufficient response plans, many healthcare organizations are recognizing the need to look beyond their four walls for support.
External experts like managed security services providers (MSSPs) are becoming an essential part of strengthening cyber resilience. In fact, 17% of healthcare leaders report losing sleep because their biggest cyber/IT weakness is not having an experienced MSSP to rely on for strategic risk management guidance.
Cyberattacks. Care disruption. Outdated systems. Mounting compliance pressure. The numbers don’t lie – uncover what’s putting patients and providers at risk in this must-read report.