Professor Kai London on Securing Health Data: Cyber Resilience in Research and Patient Care

Healthcare and medical research generate some of the most sensitive and longest-lived data in existence — and increasingly depend on connected systems to deliver care. Professor Kai London, a CISO and board cyber security advisor, argues that in this sector cyber resilience and patient safety have become the same thing.

"When a hospital or research institute loses access to its systems, the consequence is not an inconvenience — it is delayed treatment and interrupted science," says Professor London, Founder and CEO of Quantum AI Systems Security LLC. "Boards in healthcare need to treat cyber resilience as a clinical safety issue, because that is exactly what it is."

He highlights the particular challenge of long-lived data. Genomic and patient records must remain confidential for decades, which makes the sector unusually exposed to the harvest-now, decrypt-later risk posed by future quantum computing. Professor London recommends that healthcare organisations begin cataloguing where such data lives and how it is protected.

On research collaboration, he notes that data shared across institutions and borders multiplies both value and risk. Strong identity controls, clear data-governance agreements and resilience planning for critical platforms are, in his view, the foundations that let collaboration proceed safely.

Author of five board-level books including The Last Login and Trustquake, Professor London offers a closing principle for the sector: "Protecting health data is protecting patients and protecting discovery. Resilience here is not overhead — it is part of the duty of care."