New joint offering looks to secure medical IoT

Forescout has entered into a strategic partnership with Medigate with the intention of reducing the risk of medication Internet of Things devices.

As part of the partnership, Forescout will integrate with and resell Medigate. There will be a specific focus on device identification, security and operational management for health delivery organisations (HDOs).

Forescout, specialising in device visibility and control, and Medigate, the medical device security and asset management solution, will help healthcare organisations continuously discover, identify, assess and secure all Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), IoT, operational technology (OT) and IT network connected devices.

Through this new collaboration, the companies have developed an integration to bring together Medigate's in-depth IoMT visibility, anomaly detection and lifecycle management capabilities with Forescout's enterprise device visibility, automated segmentation and incident response capabilities.

Forescout will also resell the Medigate Platform. Medigate enables IT, info security, biomedical and clinical engineering teams to identify, monitor and secure every medical device on the clinical network.

Utilising Medigate's medical device classification and information, Forescout will enforce granular access control, segmentation and other compliance policies for clinical networks.

Forescout will also extend these capabilities across all other connected devices in the health delivery organisation for centralised device visibility and control platform.

According to the companies, the joint offering will utilise passive technologies to identify and classify all connected medical devices and IT assets on health delivery organisation networks, including unknown and hard-to-classify devices, while minimising disruption.

The companies write in a statement that the offering will support corporate security policies, and with vulnerability management, anomaly and threat detection, as well as risk scoring, it will protect biomedical devices.

In addition, utilising the offering, customers can design and implement segmentation and control access to the clinical network.

Forescout chief product and strategy officer Pedro Abreu says, "Connected medical devices represent a fast-growing threat attack vector and the lack of device manufacturer standardisation and interoperability has created a significant problem for clinical care network operations.

"The combination of Medigate's deep knowledge of medical devices and the healthcare industry with Forescout's breadth of device intelligence adds a new level of cohesive device insight, expertise and security for the healthcare industry.

Medigate cofounder and CEO Jonathan Langer says, "The Medigate and Forescout partnership and integration provide healthcare organisations with rich contextual visibility into their IT and clinical networks, as well as sophisticated network analysis to detect threats and implement clinically-driven policies.

"These actionable insights will, in turn, reduce risk and improve patient safety.

Central to the new partnership is a coordinated sales and marketing strategy to address customers' IT, clinical technology and biomedical needs, including 'The Healthy Hospital' Interoperability Showcase with Arista, the companies state.