Secure SASE for Healthcare

New-age technological advancements are providing the healthcare sector with new and innovative ways of managing and delivering patient services while improving profitability. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that organizations protect patient data and implementing a Secure SD-WAN solution can help simplify adherence to compliance requirements. In a new age of protecting and delivering top healthcare, healthcare organizations need to allow digitally transform their traditional systems and tools:

  • Cloud is enabling hospitals with easy storage and constant access to electronic health records (EHRs) irrespective of where the care providers and patients are located.
  • Hospitals are increasingly adopting VDIs or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to quickly and securely access patient records on their mobile devices.
  • Telehealth facility allows healthcare providers to provide medical consultations to their patients virtually over video conferencing. In doing so, hospitals can cut down in-person visit costs, as well as deliver quality services to patients located in remote, rural regions.
  • Promising technologies such as IoT, AI, and Big Data analytics are driving unique and remarkable opportunities for the healthcare sector. Adopting these new technologies has helped health care providers streamline operations, collect patient preferences and market trends information, facilitate predictive and preventive care, remotely monitor patient vitals using wearables, and carry out complicated medical procedures and clinical trials comfortably and efficiently.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) for Healthcare
Healthcare Solution Brief

Healthcare organizations looking to secure their patient information and employee access require a new approach that simplifies access policies, offers network visibility, and addresses data protection.

The Global Digital Transformation in the Healthcare Market is estimated to reach USD 50.15 billion by 2024, registering a CAGR of 14.5% during the forecast period of 2019–2024.

Market Research Healthcare Report

Eliminating Outages and Inefficiences for Healthcare Providers

Technological innovations have immensely helped the healthcare sector in building a patient-centric service model that meets modern-day customer expectations. However, keeping this complex digital-driven ecosystem up and running efficiently and cost-effectively has been an endless struggle.

WAN network is the backbone anchoring all units of healthcare—medical staff, equipment, hospital branches, VDIs, and patients. Supporting this complex and large ecosystem requires a secure, scalable, agile, and high-performing network infrastructure. On the contrary, legacy WAN inefficiencies are growing by the day, unable to keep up with changing demands, creating huge bottlenecks in service delivery.

  • VDIs often use bandwidth-intensive cloud applications to access patient records and medical images. Legacy WAN running primarily on expensive MPLS has limited bandwidth capacity and is failing to meet the increased bandwidth demands. Investing in more MPLS to make up for the bandwidth deficiency is becoming unaffordable.
  • Telehealth leverages real-time applications such as voice and video for medical consultations. Frequent network outages in the legacy WAN is leading to dropped calls, choppy audio, and jitter-ridden video disrupting the user experience.
  • The healthcare sector is heavily governed by data privacy and payment security regulations, such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS. Legacy WAN, with multiple devices and interfaces, all working in silos, with little visibility into the network, has made compliance management a complex and arduous task taking months to handle software upgrades across all branches after internal validation.
  • Mergers and acquisitions are an inherent part of the growth and survival strategy for the healthcare sector. Setting up or integrating new branches with a legacy WAN network is a nightmare, taking as long as three months, slowing down time-to-market.

Besides the legacy WAN problems, healthcare providers continue to battle management expectations to cut down costs, improve operational efficiency, meet patient demands, and maintain rigorous regulatory compliance.

Providing the Best Level of SASE Care

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can help resolve operational inefficiencies and catalyze digital growth, the healthcare sector is now turning to Secure SD-WAN.

The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

 

Always Available Network

Secure SD-WAN offers the ability to aggregate multiple connections of any type, such as MPLS, broadband, wireless 4G, and LTE. By leveraging all available bandwidth, Secure SD-WAN makes the network agile enough to support more traffic volumes, and changing bandwidth demands. In doing so, it ensures continuous network availability and uninterrupted access to bandwidth-intensive EHRs and telehealth applications, hosted on the cloud. Secure SD-WAN’s multiple transport link resilience also helps significantly cut down MPLS-driven bandwidth costs.

 

High Application Performance

Secure SD-WAN architecture embeds application intelligence, enabling deep packet inspection by the network, beyond its source and destination. It intelligently prioritizes application traffic based on business-intent policies and automatically directs them across the ideal transport route. This helps ensure mission-critical healthcare applications are always running smoothly, even during network outages, further improving application reliability and quality of experience. It also enables IT to spend less time dealing with network complexities and have more time and focus applied to business applications and services.

 

Centralized Management and Control

With centralized management and control, Secure SD-WAN dramatically simplifies WAN deployment and monitoring. Using simple, template-driven workflows, it eliminates tedious, error-prone configurations. With zero-touch deployment, IT can deploy patches, roll out policy updates, and strictly adhere to regulatory mandates across all branch locations from a single central orchestrator in one-go. Secure SD-WAN also offers deep granular visibility into applications, devices, and users to immediately detect and fix anomalies. With a cloud-based Secure SD-WAN, healthcare providers can effortlessly manage their complex networks, quickly propagate or integrate new remote branches (in less than a month!), and simply plug-in to instantly connect to cloud services. By eliminating the need for manual visits to each branch site, Secure SD-WAN also saves substantial operational costs.

 

Secure Connectivity

Secure SD-WAN ’s segmentation enables IT to securely consolidate disparate physical environments into a single network. In doing so, they can isolate the highly sensitive patient and payment related traffic from the regular internal traffic, guest/patient WiFi traffic, and IoT traffic for robust security and better regulatory compliance. Additionally, Secure SD-WAN also integrates end-to-end multi-layer security with best-of-breed features such as next-gen firewall, encryption, contextual awareness, and more. These deeper security capabilities allow healthcare providers to steer away from data center backhauling of cloud traffic, and instead directly access cloud data and applications, without fearing security risks.

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