CloudWave announced its plan to acquire Sensato Cybersecurity, a deal aimed at drawing together cloud hosting services and managed security-as-a-service capabilities.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Sensato's founder John Gomez will join CloudWave as chief security and engineering officer.

WHY IT MATTERS

CloudWave, an independent cloud and managed-services software-hosting vendor, focuses solely on healthcare. It manages more than 250 hospital environments in the public cloud and the OpSus private cloud platform. 

The company's cybersecurity tactical operations center (CTOC) has provided continuous monitoring by cybersecurity analysts and incorporates machine learning. The addition of the Sensato Cybersecurity suite further fortifies the OpSus Cloud Services platform, according to the announcement. 

The blending of operations for cybersecurity and cloud service delivery spanning public cloud, private cloud and now on-premises healthcare technology environments is also unprecedented and aims to provide a seamless, enhanced experience to customers, CloudWave said.

With the acquisition, hospitals can implement a fully managed, HIPAA- and NIST-compliant cybersecurity program, with end-to-end service and support from a single provider.

"The Sensato Cybersecurity suite offers a level of healthcare data protection to hospitals that would be difficult to implement on our own," Rich Temple, vice president and CIO at Deborah Heart and Lung Center in Browns Mills, New Jersey, said in the statement. "There's peace of mind in knowing that our systems are being monitored and protected by an experienced team of cybersecurity specialists."

IT operations have significantly simplified with a single provider for cloud-hosted applications delivery and on-premises cybersecurity, he added.

THE LARGER TREND

In March, CloudWave unveiled a secure data backup platform – OpSus Vault – an offline storage location for protected healthcare data that is locked to prevent encryption, edits and deletes. The cloud location replicates a copy of a save-set and stores the contents in a separate domain, in a secured vault with an immutable storage policy.

It's a critical element in recovering from a ransomware attack because restoration of the immutable backup is done without needing to pay the ransom, Erik Littlejohn, president and CEO of CloudWave, told Healthcare IT News in a conversation earlier this year.

While healthcare has primarily invested in reactive security technologies, the frequency of cybercrime is pushing hospitals to consider implementing proactive security measures that prevent crippling attacks like ransomware.

"Resiliency used to mean hardening, but now it means more flexibility. Prolonged workflows on backup – like paper and pen – are not going to work. Healthcare IT leaders need to focus on speed and agility to recover and restore normal operations, and the cloud is a huge asset for enabling that," Littlejohn said.

ON THE RECORD

"An increasing number of customers have called upon CloudWave for rapid response services to help halt and remediate cyberattacks on their on-premises systems in just the last two years," Littlejohn said in the statement. 

"With the addition of the innovative, proprietary technologies included in the Sensato Cybersecurity suite, along with the cyber expertise of the Sensato team, CloudWave will be able to offer customers the high-level cybersecurity we provide for our cloud-based delivery to on-premises systems."

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.