CISO Trainings , Governance & Risk Management , Healthcare

CyberEdBoard Insights: Christopher Frenz

Frenz Discusses Zero Trust in Healthcare and Essential Steps for Modern Security
Christopher Frenz, assistant vice president, IT security, Mount Sinai South Nassau, and CyberEdBoard member

The healthcare sector is plagued by increasingly complex cyberthreats, and simply meeting compliance standards is not doing enough to protect sensitive healthcare data, according to Christopher Frenz, assistant vice president of IT security at Mount Sinai South Nassau.

See Also: Cloud Security and Developers: Role of Zero Standing Privilege

Instead of relying on generic metrics, which can be misleading, Frenz said he looks "at the playbooks various attackers use and run those techniques against my own environment, to look at the efficacy of my controls."

This approach is a "great way to get buy-in from the board and other people within the organization" because security practitioners can quantitatively show how a particular project changed the risk profile of the organization, indicate where improvements are necessary and "provide ROI to security" by demonstrating tangible improvements through empirical testing, he said.

In this interview with Information Security Media Group at the 2024 Healthcare Cybersecurity Summit, Frenz also discussed:

  • The importance of adopting a zero trust model in the healthcare sector;
  • The evolving role of CISOs in healthcare settings;
  • How forums such as CyberEdBoard foster communication and collaboration among security leaders.

Frenz is a healthcare information security and privacy expert specializing in holistic organizational security and implementing zero trust security in the hospital environment. He has nearly 25 years of experience in governance and technology and has authored two books. He is a CyberEdBoard member.


CyberEdBoard is ISMG's premier members-only community of senior-most executives and thought leaders in the fields of security, risk, privacy and IT. CyberEdBoard provides executives with a powerful, peer-driven collaborative ecosystem, private meetings and a library of resources to address complex challenges shared by thousands of CISOs and senior security leaders located in 65 different countries worldwide.

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About the Author

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee

Executive Editor, HealthcareInfoSecurity, ISMG

McGee is executive editor of Information Security Media Group's HealthcareInfoSecurity.com media site. She has about 30 years of IT journalism experience, with a focus on healthcare information technology issues for more than 15 years. Before joining ISMG in 2012, she was a reporter at InformationWeek magazine and news site and played a lead role in the launch of InformationWeek's healthcare IT media site.




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