LANGuardian for Healthcare Networks

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Cameron Richard
8 years ago
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1 LANGuardian for Healthcare Networks NetFort LANGuardian is the industry s leading deep packet inspection software for monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting on network activity. It is a passive network traffic analyser, not inline, so it doesn t impact on network performance. There are no proxies, no agents or clients to install, and no special hardware appliances are needed.

2 Hospital networks have played an important role in healthcare delivery with new applications that improve patient care and drive down spiralling healthcare costs. However, rapid changes in nextgeneration wired and wireless healthcare applications mean that the network is no longer an option, but a necessity. CIOs are under increasing pressure to provide an infrastructure that can be optimized for these next-generation applications. Applications such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR), CPOE systems, physician and patient portals, wireless monitoring and the increasing use of handheld devices and broader imaging distribution all drive the need for stable networks to provide a more robust, higher-performing, and secure network infrastructure. This infrastructure is critical to reduce staff wait times and allow staff and patient mobility, equipment tracking, and broader integration of data systems. Even with the need to control costs, CIOs are still expected to fund network growth as more and more devices are connected via the wired and wireless network. Why network activity monitoring is important? Network activity monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for problems caused by devices, applications or users. Network activity monitoring systems need one or more sources of data. Basics details can be obtained using SNMP and greater detail can be sourced using packet capture techniques. For example, details extracted from network packets can help organizations understand how physicians are using applications, track patient data through hospitals, and monitor for suspicious malware or other security incidents. What is packet analysis? Packet analysis is normally associated with SPAN or mirror ports, which are available on most managed network switches. Port mirroring is used on a network switch to send a copy of network packets seen on one switch port (or an entire VLAN) to a network monitoring connection on another switch port. Port mirroring on a Cisco Systems switch is generally referred to as Switched Port Analyser (SPAN); some other vendors have other names for it, such as Roving Analysis Port (RAP) on 3Com switches. Deep packet inspection (DPI) applies to technologies that use packets as a data source and then extract metadata such as application or website names. In contrast, SNMP, log files or flow data in most cases does not provide any information about what is contained within packet payloads. For this reason, when analysing an application, it is critical to use packet capture solutions because they

Content-based application recognition, which is based on Deep Packet Inspection, can identify

3 let you see the actual packets involved in client conversations and identify the root cause of an issue. Content-based application recognition, which is based on Deep Packet Inspection, can identify traffic by application, even when unusual or dynamic port numbers are used. The image below shows the typical sort of information that is extracted from a network packet using deep packet inspection.

4 Why LANGuardian is the best choice for network activity monitoring? With LANGuardian, IT organizations can ensure fast and reliable performance for systems that directly impact patient care and employee productivity, such as web portals, EHR, and CPOE systems. The LANGuardian platform monitors all transactions in real time and captures important metadata which can be used by IT teams to identify potential problems early so they can prevent outages, analyse performance degradations and fix issues before they impact end users. LANGuardian also keeps a historical record of network activity when enables forensics for past events. This real-time and historical metadata has many uses including: Generate an audit trail of all user activity, not just Internet activity but internal application activity as well. LANGuardian gives you the ability to search for a username so you can see all activity on a single screen. Monitor controlled systems. A lot of hospital devices can be difficult to patch so monitoring them for exploit attempts and malware is crucial. You can create custom reports on LANGuardian which can focus on specific systems or applications. Wireless and handheld device monitoring. Some monitoring systems use agents or client software which can be problematic when it comes to wireless or handheld devices. LANGuardian uses network traffic as a data source so it is vendor agnostic. Visibility of data transfers internally. LANGuardian can capture file activity information directly from network packets and can associate this with actual user names. This will allow you to passively monitor data like patient records which may be held on files shares for example. Network security issues. The number of threats and vulnerabilities associated with devices and applications continues to rise. Recent events like Heartbleed, Cryptorbit, Backoff PoS, Shellshock and Poodle highlights the need for continuous monitoring. LANGuardian can be used to alert on suspicious activity and its historical database can be used to investigate past events.

What our customers say We wanted to maintain our technical excellence at the hospital said Mshari Najeeb Al-abdulkarim, Computer Network Specialist at King Faisal Specialist Hospital.

5 What our customers say We wanted to maintain our technical excellence at the hospital said Mshari Najeeb Al-abdulkarim, Computer Network Specialist at King Faisal Specialist Hospital. It was clear that we needed high definition visibility into user and business internet access, and our current solution could not provide this. Consequently, we selected NetFort s LANGuardian to help us know our network better.

Flow Analysis Versus Packet Analysis. What Should You Choose?

Flow Analysis Versus Packet Analysis. What Should You Choose? www.netfort.com Flow analysis can help to determine traffic statistics overall, but it falls short when you need to analyse a specific conversation