4 Cybersecurity Action Points Canadian Healthcare Organizations Must Address

As per CDW’s 2026 Canadian Cybersecurity Study, the healthcare industry remains one of the most targeted sectors in Canada. The study found that healthcare organizations experienced an average of 293 cyberattacks per organization, compared to the national average of 241 attacks across all sectors. Nearly two-thirds of attacked healthcare organizations also reported a resulting data breach.

These are concerning numbers, but the clinical impact is greater. The average downtime for healthcare organizations following a cyberincident has increased to 20.6 days.

In healthcare, 20 days is not simply an IT outage. It represents surgeries being postponed, chemotherapy appointments delayed and clinical teams reverting to paper-based processes while trying to maintain continuity of care.

At the bedside, prolonged downtime means:

• Physicians manually document their orders for medication, laboratory tests and diagnostic imaging requisitions.
• Pharmacies are left to rely on faxed and handwritten requisitions, increasing the risk of transcription errors.
• Patient transfers between facilities become more complex when clinical records are not readily available.
• Clinical teams spend significant time reconciling paper records back into electronic systems once services are restored.

This is why cyber resilience should be viewed as a patient safety outcome as much as a technology objective. As attacks become more sophisticated and recovery becomes more challenging, healthcare organizations need to focus on building resilience with their people, processes and technologies.

Based on my experience, I view the following action points as necessary to help improve the cybersecurity posture across healthcare organizations, including hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities.

A key reason why cybersecurity investments fail is that they don't take clinical workflows into account from the beginning.

Clinicians interact with numerous applications throughout a shift. They access patient information on electronic medical records, medication systems, diagnostic tools, communication platforms and specialty clinical applications, often while moving between departments, devices and care settings.

When cybersecurity controls add unnecessary complexity, clinicians may resort to unsafe workarounds. In a clinical department, it's hard to blame them for writing down passwords, sharing credentials or bypassing multifactor authentication prompts. These shadow processes appear because staff need to prioritize patient care above all else.

From a cybersecurity perspective, these behaviours create risk. From a clinical perspective, they are often symptoms of technologies that didn't consider frontline realities.

Healthcare organizations should involve clinical and operational teams early when evaluating and deploying cybersecurity solutions. Understanding how users actually work helps create security controls that support care delivery rather than disrupt it.

In addition to stronger defences, here's how leaders can view healthcare security goals:

• Reduce clicks and friction for clinicians in their day-to-day activities.
• Protect personal health information for patients.
• Support efficient care delivery without compromising safety.
• Provide clinicians with more time at the bedside.

When cybersecurity aligns with clinical workflows, organizations can reduce unsafe workarounds while improving both security and patient outcomes.

Another challenge facing healthcare organizations is the gap between perceived cybersecurity maturity and actual capability.

Many healthcare leaders feel confident that their organizations are making progress because budgets have increased and new technologies have been deployed. Yet evidence continues to show that foundational risk areas often remain the same.

Key security areas such as identity governance, third-party risk management, insider threat programs and recovery planning are often not fully accounted for.

Due to this, many projects appear successful from an implementation perspective but struggle after go-live. In other words, turning a solution on does not mean it is being used safely, effectively or consistently.

This is why organizations should regularly benchmark their security programs using structured assessments. A holistic security assessment aligned to frameworks such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) and Centre for Internet Security (CIS) Controls can help measure your cybersecurity maturity.

These assessments can help healthcare leaders:

• Identify foundational capability gaps.
• Prioritize investments based on risk.
• Create a roadmap for improvement.
• Measure progress over time.

The ultimate goal is not to prove that investments have been made. It is to prove those investments are producing measurable outcomes.

At CDW Canada, we can help you conduct these assessments to uncover areas that need your attention immediately. Our goal with the assessments is to help you measure your cybermaturity while also demonstrating the value behind security investments.

If there's one area that deserves immediate attention across healthcare, it is identity.

Identity and access management remains one of the most significant cybersecurity challenges facing organizations today.

In healthcare environments, identity-related risks often appear as:

• Identity sprawl across numerous systems.
• Credential fatigue from excessive logins.
• Shared accounts on shared devices.
• Clinical workflow shortcuts that bypass security controls.

These challenges start as simple technical issues but can become full-blown workflow issues.

When clinicians need to navigate numerous systems during busy shifts, the ability to continue delivering patient care is often the priority even if it means creating a workaround. Unfortunately, every workflow shortcut also creates a potential shortcut for attackers.

Strengthening identity management requires a combination of:

• Multifactor authentication (MFA).
• Conditional access policies.
• Privileged access management (PAM).
• Identity governance controls.

Just as important is reducing complexity wherever possible. The fewer credentials, manual steps and security obstacles clinicians encounter, the less likely they are to create risky workarounds.

Healthcare organizations must also strengthen their incident response capabilities, extending beyond the IT department.

Clinical teams should participate in tabletop exercises and downtime rehearsals, so they understand how care will continue during a cyberincident. When systems fail, the clinical workaround becomes the resilience strategy.

Resilience is most effective when it has been designed, tested and practiced before an incident occurs.

Canadian organizations are rapidly embracing AI. The 2026 CDW Canadian Cybersecurity Study found that 54.4 percent of Canadian organizations are planning or piloting AI/GenAI initiatives. AI in healthcare is showing signs of continued growth with several clinical use cases in sight.

 For instance, AI is already delivering value in areas such as:

• Ambient clinical documentation
• Workflow automation
• Task routing
• Administrative efficiency

These technologies have the potential to reduce clinicians’ burden and improve operational performance. However, AI adoption introduces new governance challenges.

Data privacy, regulatory uncertainty, integration complexity and skills shortages remain among the most significant barriers to scaling AI initiatives. And all of these challenges intersect with cybersecurity and governance.

To ensure that AI initiatives don't cause operational challenges, in my view, healthcare organizations must treat AI governance as a current priority.

With patient data already being touched by AI initiatives today, AI can amplify existing weaknesses in identity, data management and third-party risk.

Therefore, foundational cybersecurity should be established before AI initiatives scale broadly. Strong governance frameworks help ensure AI enables safer, more efficient care delivery without introducing unnecessary risk.

The cybersecurity challenges I've observed in healthcare cannot be solved through technology alone. Effective programs require collaboration between IT, security, clinical leadership and frontline staff.

At CDW Canada, we help healthcare organizations bridge the gap between cybersecurity strategy and clinical reality. Our team combines healthcare expertise, cybersecurity advisory services and proven implementation experience to help organizations strengthen resilience while supporting care delivery.

Our healthcare cybersecurity services include:

• Risk advisory services: Gain a clear understanding of your organization's cyber risks with strategic guidance from CDW Canada's security advisors.
• Cybersecurity maturity assessments: Evaluate the strengths, gaps and readiness of your security program through a structured assessment that benchmarks current capabilities.
• 30-day holistic security assessments: Replace assumptions with evidence through a comprehensive review of your security posture.
• Identity and Privileged Access Management (PAM) advisory services: Reduce identity-related risk by modernizing authentication, access controls and privileged account management.
• Clinical-IT tabletop exercises: Prepare IT and clinical teams to respond effectively during a cyberincident through realistic exercises that test communication, decision-making and downtime procedures.
• Canadian-based 24x7 MDR and SOC: Extend your security operations with around-the-clock monitoring, threat detection and incident response from Canadian-based security professionals. 

The most resilient healthcare organizations recognize that cybersecurity is not just about preventing attacks. It is about ensuring patient care can continue safely when disruptions occur.

Because ultimately, every cybersecurity investment should accomplish three things: reduce complexity for clinicians, protect patients or buy back valuable time at the bedside.