“Recent advancements in decentralized identity include passwordless authentication, time-bound credentials, and dynamic identity chaining. These innovations reduce risk, improve privacy, and enhance user control. Separation of authentication from authorization enables more precise access management. One-way functions protect biometric data in cloud environments. Emerging standards like SPIFFE and CSA’s agentic identity frameworks offer scalable, interoperable solutions. Together, these developments support secure, flexible identity ecosystems without relying on centralized authorities.”
“Organizations can implement zero-trust security without disrupting user experience by prioritizing frictionless authentication, especially biometrics, and enforcing least-privilege access through dynamic policies. Understanding user context and behavior enables informed decisions that preserve continuity. Self-service access tools reduce delays, while streamlined verification processes minimize frustration. With thoughtful planning and clear communication, zero trust can enhance both security and usability, ensuring users access only what they need—when they need it—without unnecessary barriers. This report includes insights from executives and technologists at CyberSolve, Lumos, Imprivata, Simeio, Panani, Keyless, Oasis, Apono, Omada, and Cubeless, quoted throughout the discussion.”
Target Audience Titles:
Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Information Officer
Chief Product Officer, Chief Experience Officer
IAM engineers, Security Architects, DevSecOps Engineers, UX Designers, IT Ops Managers, Application Security Architects
Key Takeaways
Use biometric authentication to streamline access and reduce friction for users.
Apply least-privilege policies with dynamic adjustments to maintain secure, appropriate access.
Enable self-service access changes to minimize delays and improve user experience.
Understand user context and behavior to make informed, non-disruptive security decisions.
How can organizations implement zero-trust security without disrupting user experience?
We took the most frequently asked and most urgent technology questions straight to the Technologists gathering at Identiverse 2025 held at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. This Whisper Report addresses the question regarding how can organizations implement zero-trust security without disrupting user experience?
What is the desired user experience?
At the end of the day, the goal is, as Imprivata’s Diron Chai put it, “authentication and visibility and control to making sure that you know the right people are accessing the data whether remotely or within the organization in terms of their role and their functionality and then be a being able to understand who’s in the system when and why that all ladders up to a zero-trust architecture that we’re able to bring forth in a full architecture.” Reaching this goal won’t be easy but as Simeio’s Octavio Lopez emphasized, “There’s a lot of communication that needs to happen and that’s something that we help a lot of our customers with.” A lot of communication and planning with the customers’ experience kept in mind. Here are five suggestions attendees at Identiverse offered also depicted in Figure 1.
1. Go Frictionless with Bio
One common suggestions to deploy biometric based identity and access management solution. As Panani’s Jim Harris suggested, “make the authentication of your customer as frictionless as possible a one-time identity verification process establishes that customer in the future they present a simple credential match their biometric information to the information stored in the credential that they own and control making it a very frictionless fast way to authenticate with your customer.” And this is something Alex Jones from Keyless can also agree with! “going to pitch biometrics this is the fastest way to prove who you are effectively implementing zero trust.”
2. Understand User Context
Guy Feinberg at Oasis suggests that understanding the user context is the winning approach. He started by simply asking “Are you familiar with the scream test?” For those of you not familiar, one not uncommon method in IT to understand how a resource, in this case an identity, is used by disconnecting or unplugging the resource and see who screams. Feinberg went on to further explain, “when you want to understand what’s this identity is used for so what you do you decommission it and just see who’s at the open space is screaming that something is broke. We do we help you construct all the context around the consumption of that identity so you can see the full picture before you’re taking actions so you’ll have informed actions deciding do we need this type of identity now uh should we change the permission should we decommissioning it completely all without disrupting the workforce and making sure that business continuity stays on and nothing is disrupted aspects of this.”
3. Understand User behaviour
Beyond the context of what the user is using, Imprivata’s Diron Chai recommends also understanding the how and the when. “ Being able to inject simple multifactor authentication into the environment at the local level also being able to track the behavior of credentials of people accessing like Windows endpoints as an example or mobile devices and be able to have the analytics to show utilization of the endpoint but also who what when was accessed within that session.”
4. Use Self-Service
To maintain the best user experience, Apono’s Ofir Stein recommends getting the human out of the loop. “you keep the user experience by allowing self-serve in your organization to provide access changes combine these two and you actually provide zero trust to all of the resources.”
5. Leverage Dynamic Policies
Omada’s Craig Ramsay highlighted the potential behind dynamic policies. “By using dynamic and continuous policies to make sure that their access is appropriate and it’s always at that level of least privilege and then it’s granted, when they join the organization, and as they move around the organization, and it stays appropriate.” It’s always nice when your privileges keep up with organizational changes – without human intervention or manual configuration.
In Conclusion
As Cubeless’ Treb Ryan concluded, “I find zero trust has greatly enhanced our user experiences and greatly made my job easier in the old days where there’s systems where you had to figure out which networks could connect or who would have access to what particular piece it was a nightmare.”
Finally Lumos’s Janani Nagarajan reminded all, “not just in the networking layer not just in the app layer but a critical layer for us is identities because that’s where the workforce the humans the employees the contractors the vendors your customers are actually interacting with the apps.” Identities is the key to minimizing friction for the users in zero trust. If your organization is implementing a zero trust architecture and want to ensure you are on the right track, remember to book an inquiry.
Cybersecurity in healthcare is responsible for protecting the data that represents the life’s story of patients and infrastructure to enable proper care. Managing and securing the plethora of edge devices and the interoperability of all the technologies is an increasing challenge. There are four steps to take to enhance your healthcare cybersecurity: select a framework, leverage depth in defense, automate where possible, and test your environment.
Target Audience Titles:
Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Security Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Data Officer, Chief Privacy Officer
VP of Cybersecurity, Director of Information Security
Security Architect, Information Security Architect, Network Security Engineer, Systems Security Engineer, SOC Analysts, IAM Specialists, Director of Privacy
Key Takeaways
Device maintenance and interoperability continue to challenge healthcare environments cybersecurity.
Four steps to enhance cybersecurity in healthcare environments. Select a framework, leverage depth in defense, automate where possible, and test your solution.
Tags
cybersecurity, privacy, healthcare, healthcare technology, health tech, HIMSS, HIPPA, medical devices, edge devices, IoT, depth in defense, automate, integration, cybersecurity frameworks, Evidently, Hal Wolf, Kai Romero, Brennen Reynolds, Absolute Security, Alexander Group, Trey Chamberlin, Aisera, Daniel Carvajal Marin
We took the most frequently asked and most urgent technology questions straight to the health systems technology experts gathering at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2025 Global Health Conference and Exhibition or HIMSS 25 for short. This Whisper Report addresses the question regarding the best practices for enhancing cybersecurity in healthcare. Given that data breaches in 2024 affected 1 in 2 American’s health records, cybersecurity is top of mind in healthcare1. But healthcare data is not your shopping data, it represents much more. As Evidently’s Kai Romero shared, “the narrative Arc of who they are how they’ve suffered, how they’ve overcome the illnesses that they’ve experienced, you can’t treat that lightly … this is their life.” But there is a reason for concern in healthcare. For those unfamiliar, Russia has been found the source of ransomware attacks on the healthcare industry2. As HIMSS Hal Wolf shared, “security is a major issue our own the federal government the United States just announced that they were bringing down cyber security blockage or fundamentals against another foreign country recently that was yesterday.” There is no indication that the cyberattacks on healthcare will stop, just an announcement that the government is no longer stopping such attacks.
Understanding that healthcare data represents the whole person and their life, where are the vulnerabilities coming from in the healthcare environment? Examining the source of the security vulnerabilities can offer insights to the efforts to defend and protect this valuable healthcare data. Turns out there are two large sources of vulnerabilities.
Device Maintenance
First, devices in the healthcare environment itself are an issue. As we discussed in Whisper Report: How can AI be effectively integrated into healthcare systems?, many devices on site are old. They may not have over the air (OTA) updates, may require human in the loop to update. As Absolute Security’s Brennen Reynolds stated, “any given organization that man that has our technology about 15% of the devices that are being manually managed have some missing critical security control which increases their risk to either an operational outage or a cyber event like Ransomware.” It may sound like simple advice you have heard a million times, but keeping your equipment up to date with the latest software and security patches is simply critical.
Interoperability
Healthcare creates complicated environments full of an array of diverse vendors. Somehow these vendors and their technology – or more specifically – the diverse array of data about the patient derived must interoperate. Not just interoperate, the data must come together to provide a picture of the patient for the practitioner. Unfortunately, as Alexander Group’s Tray Chamberlin pointed out, “a lot of interoperability issues and leaks.” Getting the technology to work together is so difficult in and of itself, the process created that ‘works’ may not be a secure solution. It is critical that during any interoperability project that protection of the data in the processes is the first a priority. Furthermore, the integration architecture and solution must be examined at a detailed level to understand and identify any potential leakages created in the process.
Organizations concern about security in healthcare technology is not going to go away. Per HIMSS’s Hal Wolf, “this is going to be the coinage of which we really improve Healthcare is information (and) information comes from data the data will be unprotected so .. it is why it (cybersecurity) is one of our (HIMSS) four focus points.. at HIMSS (25) digital Health transformation, AI, cyber security, and Workforce Development.” Information is how we improve care, thus information is the goldmine of healthcare. Figure 4 depicts Four Steps to Enhance your Healthcare Cybersecurity.
Select Framework
Through the various conversations while conducting this research, it became very clear that each organization has their own framework to guide their cybersecurity program. When selecting amongst the frameworks, ensure these common characteristics are present.
It should be 100% restricting while enabling productivity.
Needs guardrails and controls
It should be deliberate and intentional with how it handles your assets.
Leverage Defense in Depth
Regardless of where the technology is used within healthcare, certain security practices should be consistent. As Evidently’s Kai Romera shared, “some of the same things that we use in the clinical setting to protect patient data whether that’s logging out of a screen pretty quickly after it’s not active or you know taking away the protected patient information so that anyone who’s looking at the screen would not know who that patient was you want to know that they’re employing those things because this (is) patient data.” Understanding no single method covers all scenarios, it is good to use every method available when possible. For example, clinical data masking technology and standards can easily be applied to the terminals used at the front desk and billing as well.
But data masking is not just useful at the terminal level. As Aisera’s pointed out, regarding you agentic AI solutions, we can do everything from masking PII for mask any personal data “architecture that’s going to keep your data private data privacy is probably the most important thing especially when it comes to healthcare right .. but also how it is stored right even in our cloud approach” our customers get the unique architecture so when you’re training the LLM you’re not trained in our models.”
Deploy Automation
Many shy away from automation, but as we pointed out in Conference Whispers: Black Hat USA 2019, a ransom ware attack can take down an organization in 30 minutes. What human on call can get notified, get online and stop an attack that fast? Furthermore, as Absolute Security’s Brennan Reynolds shared, “topic of automation there’s just too many things to be done in a day to allow and require humans to be doing all of the maintenance and management task so if the it devices across their organizations whether you have a th000 devices 10,000 or a million devices you’re never going to have enough staff to manually execute tasks to keep those devices safe and secure.” Thus it is physically impossible to stop many attacks or even simply update all the devices on site without automation.
Test!
Regardless of the care taken, it important to review the architecture and test the system. As Alexander Group’s Tray Chamberlin explained, “make sure that it’s not just we want this system we want to stand it up and we want the functionality but also going through the paces and testing and making sure that is playing nice but also doesn’t open up a new vulnerability within your system going forward.” A system that simply works is not the goal. Rather, a system must work and be secure, resilient, and hardened against attacks including its integration points is the minimum standard.
We will close with remarks by HIMSS’s Hal Wolf, “ I think cyber security is going to continue to be at the Forefront of our thoughts whenever you’re dealing with data and information they are going to be bad actors… HIMSS is focused on cyber security we have cyber security forums (and) there are cyber security events taking place.”
*When vendors’ names or quotes are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference or what we heard doing our research, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document.
