Protecting Rural Hospitals: Insights from CloudWave CISO Ashini Surati on the Risk Never Sleeps Podcast

Ashini Surati, Chief Information Security Officer at CloudWave, was recently featured on the Risk Never Sleeps Podcast to answer the question, “How do you protect rural hospitals with limited resources from today’s growing cyber threats?”

The Risk Never Sleeps Podcast highlights the people protecting patient safety in today’s increasingly digital healthcare environment. During the episode, Ashini shared her journey into healthcare cybersecurity and offered valuable insights on safeguarding rural hospitals in an environment full of increasing cyberthreats. She emphasized the critical need for tailored, collaborative, and proactive security strategies to protect patient data and ensure continuous care.

Many rural healthcare organizations face unique financial and technical challenges, making vendor partnerships essential. Ashini explained that with a dedicated focus on healthcare IT, CloudWave uniquely supports community and mid-sized hospitals through comprehensive managed cloud services, managed security services, and 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC) monitoring. CloudWave’s deep healthcare expertise enables it to design solutions that directly address frontline realities, ensuring hospitals can focus on patient care while removing the IT security burden.

A core focus of the podcast was the importance of a team-oriented approach to healthcare cybersecurity. Protecting patient data isn’t the responsibility of IT alone; it requires collaboration among healthcare providers, vendors, and third-party partners who all adhere to the same high standards and expectations.

Ashini further stressed that reactive defenses are no longer sufficient. Instead, healthcare organizations need always-on, proactive protections such as incident response and continuous monitoring that adapt to the evolving threat landscape, whether safeguarding connected medical devices or legacy systems.

Looking ahead, healthcare organizations must balance legacy systems and emerging technologies, including AI, to remain secure and efficient. Key initiatives outlined for the next 12-24 months included helping hospitals increasingly adopt key technologies such as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Managed Detection and Response (MDR). These critical managed security services address common challenges such as alert fatigue, staffing shortages, manual response delays, and compliance pressures, including HIPAA, and include advanced tools such as SIEM/SOAR for automated incident response—enabling CloudWave to provide always-on protection built for the realities of modern healthcare.

Tune in to the Risk Never Sleeps Podcast to learn more about how CloudWave partners with healthcare providers, especially rural and community hospitals, to keep patients safe: https://podcast.censinet.com/episode-144-code-blue-meets-code-red-cybersecurity-in-scrubs-with-ashini-surati-ciso-at-cloudwa/