February 09, 2026
Healthcare leaders manage environments that change quickly. Cloud services, web-facing clinical tools, medical devices and telehealth platforms are added or updated regularly. This pace makes it hard to maintain a complete and current view of what is exposed to the internet. As Connected Health senior cybersecurity consultant Rashid Mohiuddin puts it plainly: “Most teams are doing the right things, but the environment is moving faster than the processes built to manage it.” The problem is not a lack of capability. It is the reality that digital complexity has grown beyond traditional discovery and governance methods. Many organisations are still trying to answer a basic question: what do we actually have facing the public internet?
Care delivery now depends on constant connectivity. Diagnostic machines connect to cloud services. Clinical applications integrate with third parties. Staff adopt new tools to support patients. Mergers, legacy systems and decentralised operations make it difficult to maintain a single, reliable view of all externally facing assets. Rashid emphasises that when visibility falls behind daily operations, risk becomes immediate. A misconfigured cloud asset, an unpatched web server created years ago, or an unmanaged remote access point can become the entry path that disrupts critical services and affects patient safety.
Most organisations rely on vulnerability management, cloud posture management, SIEM, endpoint protection and supplier risk frameworks. These are essential, but as Rashid points out, they primarily assess what the organisation already knows it owns. They rarely identify assets created outside standard processes, inherited through acquisitions, deployed in shadow environments or managed by third parties. They also do not continuously scan the broader internet, so exposures can sit unnoticed for long periods. Rashid stresses that adversaries start from the outside in. Any gap between what the organisation thinks it owns and what is actually visible becomes an unmonitored attack path.
This is where Attack Surface Management, or ASM, is proving its value. ASM addresses unknown exposure by continuously mapping the real external footprint across cloud, web, networks and third-party environments. It identifies what is active, misconfigured, outdated or outside expected controls.
Rashid highlights three capabilities that matter most in healthcare organisations:
Rashid notes that ASM strengthens current investments. Feeding ASM insights into SIEM, VM, CSPM, SOAR and incident response aligns teams to a single source of truth and improves risk prioritisation.
Healthcare organisations are expected to maintain continuous awareness of external exposure, protect systems handling sensitive data, monitor third-party and supply chain risk, respond rapidly to emerging vulnerabilities and demonstrate uplift in cyber maturity. ASM provides the real-time visibility that supports these expectations and improves incident readiness. Rashid’s guidance is clear: “You cannot secure what you cannot see. And you cannot govern what you do not understand.”
Digital transformation will continue to accelerate. Attackers will keep exploiting the gaps left behind. In many cases, adversaries know more about an organisation’s external footprint than the organisation itself. Rashid advises that the leaders best prepared for this reality will treat visibility as a living capability that is continuously updated, validated and embedded across security operations. ASM is no longer optional. It is the baseline for protecting patient care, sustaining operations and maintaining public trust.
Rashid Mohiuddin, senior cybersecurity consultant, Connected Health, Wavelink
Rashid Mohiuddin is a Senior Security Consultant for Connected Health at Wavelink, bringing over 14 years of expertise in IT and cybersecurity. In his role, Rashid specialises in solution scoping, leading workshops and webinars, and delivering professional services for complex projects. He has held key roles in major blue-chip organisations, including Dell, Citibank, the NRMA Group, and Exclusive Networks, where he contributed significantly to IT and cybersecurity initiatives. Rashid holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical, Electronics, and Communications Engineering, as well as a Master’s in Information Systems, focusing on Comp
