Solving healthcare’s unique security challenges: The role of zero trust and SASE

With clinicians and staff accessing patient data from dozens of locations and devices, healthcare’s attack surface has never been larger. The cost of getting security wrong — $9.77 million per breach on average, according to CrowdStrike’s “Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats” report — is the highest of any industry. And the tools most providers rely on, built around a simple block-or-allow logic, weren’t designed for healthcare’s complex, distributed environments.

Health systems need security that goes beyond verifying someone’s identity, evaluating the full context of every access request, and responding with precision. That’s the promise of combining a zero trust security framework with secure access service edge (SASE) technology, which protects patients and data without getting in the way of care delivery.

The challenges facing healthcare security teams

Healthcare security is uniquely difficult because employees, contractors, and third-party partners access systems from hospital branches, remote clinics, and home offices, often sharing workstations and tapping in and out with RFID badges throughout a shift. Each handoff is a potential vulnerability.

Shadow AI compounds the problem, with clinicians and researchers adopting AI tools faster than IT can vet them — and uploading protected health information (PHI) to large language models (LLMs)  without realizing the risks. Meanwhile, telehealth appointments and remote radiology have expanded the perimeter far beyond what legacy VPN infrastructure was built to support, introducing latency, bottlenecks, and exploitable gaps. And through it all, budgets remain constrained.

A smarter approach

Netskope is a leader in modern security and networking for the cloud and AI era, and its Netskope One platform converges SASE and security service edge (SSE) to address these challenges.

Built as one AI-native platform, Netskope brings together secure access, data security, and AI security in a unified architecture designed to protect modern traffic in real time. Legacy security and networking tools often force organizations into trade-offs: more control with more friction, or better performance with less protection. Netskope was built to remove that compromise.

Instead of relying on static or binary permissions, such as blunt block-or-allow rules, the Netskope Zero Trust Engine continuously evaluates real-time risk telemetry for every access request. By analyzing user identity, device posture, location, application risk,  specific instance, and behavior history, the platform enforces precise, adaptive trust policies. It then intelligently applies the exact  level of control required — whether that means allowing, blocking, real-time coaching, isolating the browser session, or prompting for step-up authentication and justification.

Consider a physician who logs into her corporate device, opens ChatGPT using her personal account, and attempts to upload a corporate document to summarize it. A conventional security tool makes a binary call. Netskope sees something richer: her role, her device, the specific instance of the app (personal, not corporate), what she’s trying to do with it, and the sensitivity of the data involved. From there, the platform can prompt her to justify the action and either coach her toward a safer alternative (if justified) or isolate the session (if not justified). This approach provides security guardrails without putting up roadblocks to legitimate activity.

The Netskope difference

That contextual intelligence applies across these five scenarios, addressing healthcare’s most pressing security challenges:

• Securing AI use: As staff adopt AI notetaking and research tools, Netskope provides visibility into both managed and unmanaged applications. Rather than blocking AI outright, the platform uses coach-and-pivot features to guide safer behavior. By using data loss prevention (DLP) and AI guardrails, Netskope also evaluates the actual meaning of content and blocks PHI from exposure even if the AI transforms or rewrites the data, keeping clinicians productive and compliant.    
• Shared workstations: In high-turnover environments where multiple users share devices, Netskope integrates with identity providers and leverages its Zero Trust Engine to enforce user-specific policies through every session, from badge-in to log-out. This ensures adaptive, context-aware access, so each employee accesses only what their role permits.
• Remote care delivery: Telehealth and remote radiology require fast, reliable, secure connections. Netskope replaces legacy VPNs with Universal Zero Trust Network Access (UZTNA) via Netskope One Private Access, which provides resilient, high-performance connectivity from any device or location without exposing the broader network.
• Seamless user experience: Netskope’s NewEdge Network is the world’s most performant private cloud infrastructure, purpose-built for speed and resilience. Through innovations like NewEdge AI Fast Path, it delivers full security inspection without the performance trade-offs or latency, minimizing wait times for AI-powered medical applications. This allows clinicians to stay focused on patients.
• Any user, device, site, or AI: Whether someone is a full-time employee at a flagship hospital,  a contractor at a remote clinic, or an autonomous AI agent running in the background, Netskope enforces unified security policies. The Netskope One platform secures both human and non-human interactions, applying consistent protections across every entity, device, and location.

Security that enables care

Healthcare organizations shouldn’t have to choose between security and care delivery. By consolidating networking and security functions into a single SASE platform, they can reduce tool sprawl and lower costs — while giving every clinician, wherever they are, the fast and secure access they need to do their jobs. The key? Making sure the right people can access the right resources, safely, every time.

To learn more about how Netskope secures healthcare organizations, visit us here.