Nihon Kohden America and CrowdStrike Partner to Implement Best in Class Protection Against Advanced Cyber Threats in Rapidly Changing Healthcare Environments

Implementing Endpoint Protection as First Patient Monitoring Company to Deliver Services with Crowdstrike

IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nihon Kohden America, a global leader in precision medical products and services, announced today that they have joined forces with CrowdStrike, a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint and workload protection, to provide caregivers and IT professionals the solutions needed to prevent and respond to the rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats impacting the healthcare industry. Nihon Kohden recently certified and validated the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform and will integrate it into its NK Network Care^SM Service.

The cloud-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform correlates approximately 6 trillion endpoint-related events per week in real time from across the globe, fueling one of the world’s most advanced data platforms for security. It leverages cloud-scale Artificial Intelligence (AI), behavioral analytics and proactive threat hunting to deliver, via a single lightweight agent, real-time protection, and visibility across organizations to stop all attack types. By integrating with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, Nihon Kohden’s NK NetworkCare^SM service is able to protect the most critical assets in its network and minimize disruption to the clinical system.

“The wide variety of networked medical devices has created a complex environment for healthcare IT departments to navigate,” said Scott Silcock, vice president of Service Excellence at Nihon Kohden. “We see our relationship with CrowdStrike as a strategic partnership to address this challenge. We at Nihon Kohden America look forward to having a long-term partnership that improves and evolves with the needs of the market.”

With hospital networks made up of a diverse grouping of medical and non-medical devices, managed separately but integrated continuously, breaches are possible from any number of endpoints inside and outside the medical device’s internal network. In response to a sharp increase in cybersecurity attacks within the healthcare industry in recent years, Nihon Kohden is the first to onboard CrowdStrike into their larger patient monitoring systems to establish unprecedented threat visibility, protection, and efficiency.

Nihon Kohden engineers have certified and validated the CrowdStrike Falcon platform through extensive testing on their patient monitoring devices to ensure continued uptime and availability of clinical services and continued compliance so clinical end-users can safely deploy endpoint protection while ensuring minimal disruption. This certification and validation by a vendor on their specific devices shows cybersecurity accountability unique in this market space. Teamed with the on and off-premise live monitoring capability presented by CrowdStrike Falcon dashboards, makes this partnership the first of its kind.

“The rapid proliferation of ransomware in healthcare environments has left organizations scrambling to quickly adopt a mature security strategy that protects their clinical networks and their patients against evolving threats,” said Matthew Polly, vice president of Worldwide Alliances, Channels and Business Development. “With Nihon Kohden’s certification and validation of the Falcon platform for its service, they are able to deliver a solution for clinical networks to ensure that IT and clinical engineering teams can work together to defend against sophisticated threat activity. We are proud to enter into our first partnership within the patient monitoring industry with Nihon Kohden, and we look forward to addressing the critical needs of this domain.”

About Nihon Kohden Corporation

Founded in Japan in 1951, Nihon Kohden is a leading manufacturer, developer, and distributor of medical electronic equipment, with subsidiaries in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The company’s products are now used in more than 120 countries, and it is the largest supplier of electroencephalography products worldwide. The inventor of transformational pulse oximeter technology, Nihon Kohden has envisioned, designed, and produced revolutionary devices, such as, arrhythmia analysis, low-invasive blood volume monitoring and wireless patient monitoring. For more information, visit us.nihonkohden.com.