Health care IT is drowning — and AI just made it worse

Health care IT teams have spent the past few years bracing for the next big ransomware headline. A new global survey suggests the more urgent story is what's happening every week, not just during the dramatic incidents. Nile surveyed more than 300 health care IT leaders, C-level executives, and network and security practitioners worldwide, and the results reveal an industry in which network reliability and cybersecurity have essentially merged into a single, unrelenting operational crisis.

The numbers point to a workforce stretched thin trying to keep sprawling, device-heavy networks running — a challenge compounded by the fact that connected medical devices often sit on the same infrastructure as clinical systems without matching protections. Add in a wave of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven phishing and ransomware attacks, and it's easy to see why cybersecurity has jumped to the top of IT leaders' worry lists.

The survey also paints a picture of an industry that knows what it needs — Zero Trust segmentation, better containment, automated operations — but is still years away from having it broadly in place. Perhaps most telling is how few organizations feel confident they could actually contain a breach today. That gap is driving a real appetite for outsourcing the complexity altogether.

Here are the key findings of the report: