Report by Microsoft
Enhancing cybersecurity for rural health resilience
Key Findings
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.
Most of the approximately 1,000 independent rural hospitals are not part of a larger hospital network or system
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.