Healthcare
Healthcare stopped being a building some time ago. Virtual consultations, community teams, hybrid administrative work and diagnostics delivered across sites have all moved clinical and patient data out of managed environments and onto networks nobody has assessed.
The systems are secured. The applications are secured. The connection from a district nurse’s temporary accommodation, or an administrator’s shared home broadband, is not.
That is the uncontrolled network edge, and it is one of the least examined gaps in both NHS and private healthcare security.
Why Traditional Controls Do Not Reach the Uncontrolled Edge
Most healthcare organisations encrypt data, secure applications and enforce multi-factor authentication. Very few have any visibility of the local network a user is sitting on.
The situations where that matters are entirely ordinary:
- An administrator working with patient records over shared home Wi-Fi
- A mental health practitioner working in the community
- A radiographer reviewing images from home
- A home visit team submitting clinical notes from temporary accommodation
Every one of those involves special category data under UK GDPR, reached across a network with no security assurance behind it at all.
Why the Risk Is Growing
Healthcare remains one of the most targeted sectors, and the economics of attacking the edge have changed.
Within breaches that involved exploiting a vulnerability, the proportion targeting edge devices and VPNs rose from 3% to 22% year on year, an almost eightfold increase, according to the Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report. Scanning for exposed devices is cheap and automated, and the number of actors capable of running these attacks has grown accordingly.
The NCSC and ENISA have both issued guidance pointing at the same exposure: firmware integrity, secure remote access and the security of edge devices.
How Encrypted Connections Fit In
Encrypted-connectivity clients are widely deployed in healthcare and they do a necessary job. They protect data in transit.
What they do not do is tell you anything about the network underneath. If the local network is compromised, traffic can be intercepted before the secure session is established, other devices on the same connection can be reached laterally, and DNS can be redirected. The encrypted connection is doing exactly what it was designed to do; it was simply never designed to secure the environment it starts from.
Loxada secures that environment. The two work together, and neither replaces the other.
Loxada: Practical Edge Security
Loxada replaces the unmanaged router at the point of connection with a Loxada secure router, and routes traffic through Loxada’s secure connectivity layer, an encrypted connection from the device out to the internet.
Each device:
- Runs Loxada’s secure firmware in place of the manufacturer’s
- Creates a separate work network, physically separate from other devices on the local connection
- Blocks known malicious domains, dropping requests to domains on Loxada’s aggregated blocklist before they resolve
- Updates automatically using Loxada’s secure firmware
- Returns to a secure state after tampering or a factory reset
- Supports assignment to individuals or teams, with central revocation
There is no local setup and nothing for staff to manage.
Built for How Healthcare Actually Works
Loxada suits a wide range of healthcare settings:
- Remote administrative staff in hybrid patterns.
- Community-based care teams and allied health professionals.
- Diagnostics and imaging specialists working remotely.
- Dental, therapy and mental health practitioners using shared facilities.
- Clinical trials and research units operating across multiple locations.
Deployment is fully auditable, with monthly security reports and device-status visibility.
Aligned with Regulatory Expectations
Loxada supports the technical controls expected under the frameworks healthcare organisations work to:
- UK GDPR, which requires appropriate technical measures around access to special category data.
- NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT), where remote working, device management and firmware currency are recurring areas of scrutiny.
- NCSC and ENISA guidance on firmware integrity, secure remote access and edge device security.
- Cyber insurance criteria, increasingly focused on how remote and home-based staff connect.
- Procurement and assurance frameworks, which ask for documented controls rather than stated intentions.
Loxada supports one layer, the networks outside your control that your people connect from. It is a preventive control providing deployment coverage and configuration assurance, not monitoring, detection or containment, and it complements the identity, endpoint and encrypted-connectivity tooling around it.
Why Healthcare Providers Choose Loxada
- Protects patient data at the point of access
- Reduces risk from unmanaged and shared networks
- Supports DSPT and UK GDPR evidence with documented, auditable controls
- Deploys quickly across departments, regions and community teams
- Works with your existing stack, with no systems to replace
