Report by Microsoft
Enhancing cybersecurity for rural health resilience
Key Findings
Most of the approximately 1,000 independent rural hospitals are not part of a larger hospital network or system
Microsoft estimates that the cost to mitigate basic cyber risks across all approximately 2,100 rural hospitals in the U.S. would be between $70 million and $75 million.
Just 29% of the surveyed rural hospitals separated basic accounts from more privileged accounts with broader system and data access.
More than 62% of rural hospitals struggle to implement basic email security, multifactor authentication, and network segmentation.
On average, each rural hospital would need to spend between $30,000 and $40,000 to address their cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
Only 43% of the surveyed rural hospitals ran vulnerability scanning or conducted timely patching processes.