Healthcare providers are high-value targets for attackers. A hospital can have more than a thousand endpoints, putting both the organization and its patients at risk. Connection’s Managed XDR gives providers robust protection without the cost and burden of staffing an in-house 24/7 security operations center.
Why Hospital Networks Are Harder to Secure Than Most
Healthcare providers run some of the most complex and exposed environments in any industry. A single patient room can hum with upwards of 30 interconnected devices, such as infusion pumps, monitors, ventilators, and smart beds. In a 150-room hospital, that adds up to thousands of endpoints, many of them long-lifespan medical devices that are rarely patched and were not built with security in mind.
Each device is a way in, and attacks rarely stop there. A compromised device becomes a way to move laterally across the clinical environment. Successfully securing these clinical environments requires the ability to rapidly identify and respond only to those threats that matter.
Keep Detection and Response Across Your Clinical Environment Managed
Connection’s Cisco Managed Extended Detection and Response (XDR) service is built to solve the challenges that healthcare providers face. Extended detection and response unifies telemetry from across the environment, including endpoints, network, identity, email, cloud, and the medical and IoT devices most tools miss, onto a single plane of view.
AI does the heavy work, analyzing events across the clinical environment and correlating weak signals no security analyst team could track manually. It then establishes baseline behavior for the environment, and surfaces the anomalies that deviate, such as credential use from unusual geographies, lateral movement across clinical systems, anomalous access to patient data, and more.
The result is fewer, higher-fidelity incidents instead of an expanding queue of low-confidence alerts from a sprawling set of security tools. But visibility doesn’t stop threats; action does. Detecting an actual incident is not responding to it, and in healthcare the gap between the two can directly affect patient care. That’s where the expert analysts behind the “managed” in managed XDR matter.
What Healthcare Providers Need from an XDR Platform
• Unified, single-console visibility
• AI-driven analytics and correlation
• Automated investigation and response
• Compliance and reporting support
What Is Connection’s Approach to Managed XDR?
In standard extended detection and response deployments, the security service provider may install the XDR platform, help build data integration, perform cursory tuning of the healthcare provider’s environment, and leave. Connection delivers Cisco Managed XDR in partnership with Port53, and provides 24/7 monitoring, human-led investigation, and active response. Healthcare providers get:
1. Human-led Investigation and Response
Expert analysts contain confirmed threats using pre-approved playbooks, such as:
• Isolating hosts
• Revoking access
• Blocking malicious activity
• Referring to internal teams
2. Continuous Compliance
Cisco Managed XDR follows the NIST 800-61 response process. We also continuously tune the environment, adjusting policies and retuning baselines as normal behavior shifts.
3. Complete Transparency
The service is co-managed, so healthcare organizations keep administrative access and full visibility into the alerts, investigations, and outcomes the SOC sees. This “glass box” transparency matters for regulatory documentation and internal accountability and answers the two objections healthcare providers raise most about managed services: loss of control and cost.
The Connection Difference
With Cisco Managed XDR from Connection, how much control is maintained in-house vs. managed is up to the customer. On cost, a managed service typically runs less than a single analyst annually. As one of only 12 Cisco XDR partners and a Cisco Gold Partner, Connection begins each engagement with a Security Health Check that tests existing defenses, surfaces gaps, and tunes existing controls so real threats stand out. For healthcare providers, the payoff is a combination of AI-driven detection, human-led response, and a delivery partner that doesn’t force a choice between operational control and reduced burden.
In a sector where most healthcare providers can’t justify building and staffing a 24/7 security operations center, that combination is the difference between a security program that only watches and one that protects.
Ready to take the next step with Cisco Managed XDR? Connect with the Connection Cisco Security team to explore your needs or schedule a conversation.
