Data center networking has been a fundamental part of computing for many years; however, legacy systems are not equipped to take on the challenges of the modern healthcare environment. You and your healthcare IT organization must figure out how to prioritize investments in your digital tools, technology, and analytics. While IT teams are refreshing their network infrastructure to support digitally managed in-person patient care, telehealth, and home healthcare, you are most likely looking for flexible solutions that don’t break the budget.
Taking these considerations into account, I believe that healthcare security and networking teams will increasingly become more closely aligned. Healthcare is can be slower to adopt new tech due to regulatory hurdles, data privacy concerns, and the complexity of integrating new systems in to existing IT infrastructure, with varying levels of security maturity. This means healthcare networks have a broad attack surface that is challenging to protect. At the same time, many healthcare organizations have separate teams managing networking and security, and their goals must be symbiotic with one another to maintain a secure and resilient healthcare IT infrastructure.
A networking team’s objectives are to keep people and services connected reliably, with zero downtime and predictably good performance. Meanwhile, the security organization is tasked with minimizing risk and maintaining regulatory compliance. Too often, users and their experiences are caught in the middle. These seemingly disparate goals can be brought more closely together through cross training and joint planning, and this collaboration can help teams find balance between optimal network performance and necessary security measures.
If your organization is like many in the industry—under resourced, underfunded, or both—your network infrastructure may struggle to support these digital transformation efforts including managing ever-larger volumes of data and mitigating cybersecurity risks. You can move faster—deployment times can be reduced from weeks or months to minutes—and deliver better patient care with data-first modernization that connects, secures, and automates your data center. This momentum can be carried by these three fundamentals of a modern data center:
Zero Trust for secure modern data centers
- Extends microsegmentation, firewall and encryption closer to your most security-sensitive workloads.
- Secures PACS data, EMR, and telemedicine with transformative role-based policy management and real-time visibility across facilities and remote locations.
- Protects IoT, internet of medical things (IoMT), and other insights where the patient, device, and application data is processed for an excellent patient, provider, and client experience at the edge.
Improved app response time and user satisfaction
- Eliminates lower-performance server connections to 25/100GbE, low latency connectivity. Many applications require real-time capabilities where very low latencies are non-negotiable.
- Provides high performance, ubiquitous access, and always-on networking.
- Deploys quickly and easily, a benefit for healthcare organizations that are often under resourced and underfunded.
Simplified architecture for data center efficiency
- Policy-based automation across a unified data center network simplifies data center provisioning and accelerates issue remediation.
- Reduces security appliance sprawl and costly server agents for a more efficient data center.
- Cuts purchasing of, deploying, and managing appliances, agents, and software.
Why HPE Aruba Networking?
We will continue to experience a rapid integration of technology in healthcare settings, and implementing a modern healthcare data center network will ensure that you have the tools needed to balance network, security, and user experience objectives. When you standardize on a single vendor, the tightly integrated solutions will securely connect all your enterprise domains, edge to data center to cloud, and eliminate the complexity of bolt-on and third-party additions. Our data center solutions integrate compute, storage, and networking infrastructure to help reduce the time, risk, and cost of standing up complex IT infrastructure. This means you can gain simplified data center architecture, enhanced performance, and reduced costs—all with embedded security—delivered by our DPU-enabled switch. Furthermore, our unified and automated approach to data center networking means you can achieve both performance and Zero Trust Security—without sacrificing one for the other. You can move faster and deliver better patient care with data-first modernization that connects, secures, and automates your data center.
For more information, check out our brochure for data center networking for healthcare
LillyFleming
Lilly leads healthcare marketing efforts for HPE Aruba Networking. In this role, she is passionate about enabling a modern and personalized healthcare experience for patients, providers, and administrators. She has 6+ years of experience working in the healthcare industry in medical marketing, product management, and global portfolio management roles. Lilly holds a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University.
