Differentiating Your Healthcare Institution While Improving Profitability // White Paper

Transcription

1 The Smart Route To Visibility Healthcare, an industry in transition your services and healthcare professionals online through The demand for high-quality, safe and low-cost healthcare web portals, mobile devices and social networks. In 2009, is increasing all over the world. Nowhere is this more evident more than 1,200 hospitals participated in nearly 4,200 social than in the United States as the Baby Boomer Generation networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, ages and Medicare funding comes under pressure. With the LinkedIn, foursquare, and blogs.i We anticipate this number will exception of remote locations, the US population has a wide continue to grow. So in order to differentiate, not only do you variety of choices when it comes to healthcare. This in turn is have to facilitate exceptional in-hospital care, but also provide causing healthcare institutions throughout the nation to focus on exceptional care beyond the hospital walls. This means an IT competitive differentiation in order to be the provider of choice infrastructure and an application suite that is highly available to to patients in their service region. Independent hospitals and support 24 X 7 access. Onsite Wi-Fi connectivity and healthcare hospital systems are looking to operational changes to help professionals with patient specific information at their fingertips meet this challenge so healthcare IT leaders and teams have have come to be expected of healthcare institutions. For you to been tasked with three goals: be differentiated, you have to implement a reliable Wi-Fi network that offers patient services and supports clinician mobility 1. Competitive differentiation to increase revenue throughout your facility. 2. Efficiency initiatives to improve margins 3. Augmenting patient privacy and regulatory compliance Competitive differentiation is not just about your patient s needs. You live in an environment where you have to compete for your Let s take a look at each of these goals in detail. healthcare professionals as well. Your differentiation depends on recruiting and retaining exceptional medical staff members. Your Increasing revenue through competitive differentiation medical staff wants to work in a state-of-the-art institution where Your patients have a number of choices when it comes to their they can offer rich, interactive experiences to their patients with healthcare provider. And you are at the risk of losing them at unparalleled convenience. These professionals want to focus on the next open enrollment period. So how do you build your patients without worrying about the underlying technologies or competitive differentiation? You have to move with the times in the reliability of your infrastructure. This means that the patient providing easy, anytime, anywhere access to your resources; care and patient interaction services you offer must be able to be it access to your knowledge-base or to your healthcare attract the best professionals in your region. professionals. Patients have come to expect to interact with 1

2 Improving margins through efficiency initiatives Your always on, everything on demand, stakeholders put tremendous requirements on your compute resources and your networking infrastructure. This ever increasing demand and the need for operational efficiencies have driven most hospitals to use virtualization as part of the solution. Multiple tiers of virtualized servers and load balancing equipment in the data center, virtualized desktops and a ubiquitous wireless network that is as reliable as your wired network are all part of your efficiency initiatives. Enhancing your network infrastructure under tight budget pressures and the demand for better ROI will require you to get the best possible infrastructure without overengineering the network. Augmenting patient privacy and regulatory compliance Privacy and regulatory compliance plays a major role in the healthcare industry. Regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), electronic Protected Health Information (ephi), Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) are driving the way the healthcare industry operates. The adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems will eventually lead to more efficient and effective patient care, however it could also lead to an increase in attacks and an institution s vulnerability to a large-scale ephi breach. In the simplest terms, you have to protect the patient s health records and their payment information from hackers. In today s environment of hactivism, cyber attacks from foreign countries and acts of cyber terrorism, you must not only protect your patient s healthcare records and credit card information but also make sure that your infrastructure is available and uncompromised to service your patients at all times. The final challenge in achieving your goals Driven by the need to achieve operational efficiencies you have consolidated multiple server clusters into a single data center using virtualization technologies. To reduce costs and to simplify operations you have implemented virtual desktops that are driven from your data center. Your software team has now implemented many cloud-based mobile applications that your patients and healthcare professionals enjoy. You have increased the capacity of your network infrastructure to handle the demands of streaming video services to your hospital beds. However, you still have one more challenge to overcome in order to make sure that your services are available and meet user experience expectations network visibility. According to the Yankee Group 75% of service problems are detected by the end users and 90% of the time taken to resolve an issue is spent in identifying the problem. ii This implies that without the insight into your network, all your efforts into your infrastructure would be to no avail as security breaches, connectivity issues or bandwidth choke points could still prevent you from meeting your stakeholder s expectations. The cost to distribute security devices, forensic devices, application performance monitors, network analytics tools, etc. throughout the network is prohibitive. So too often, network teams resort to last-minute reactive methods to ensure network performance, security and visibility. However, for you to achieve your goals and meet your stakeholder expectations, you must take a proactive approach to network visibility that does not strain your budget. To this end, Gigamon has introduced the Traffic Visibility Fabric. The Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric The Traffic Visibility Fabric can be thought of as visibility middleware that sits between the IT infrastructure and the tools that need the data delivering the necessary level of visibility essential for securing, operating and optimizing the current IT environment. Figure 1 shows the basic concept of a Traffic Visibility Fabric. 2

3 integrity of the applications, but also the integrity and privacy of the patient records in order for you to stay compliant to government regulations. So nobody needs to convince you to monitor your data center. However, in the face of higher speed networks, virtualization and the fact that you must justify every investment, your approach to monitoring and securing your data center becomes very important. The typical approach of letting your team use a myriad of monitoring and security tools connected to every critical data path is no longer going to be Figure 1: Traffic Visibility Fabric From the millions of communication flows, thousands of events and hundreds of changes that occur within the increasingly complex IT infrastructure, the Traffic Visibility Fabric can provide data in real-time. By prioritizing critical traffic flows over nonessential ones, one application over another, as well as optimizing packet information, the fabric is able to address issues of oversubscription and deliver the appropriate, relevant and critical information to your centralized security, monitoring and management systems. The fabric is able to extend visibility from the physical world of the network, monitoring systems and servers, to the virtual world where multiple virtual servers and networks can exist on a single physical infrastructure. From the mobile edge through to cloud environments, the Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric can see into your IT infrastructure and change the dynamics of how you choose to secure, monitor and manage your network. With the Traffic Visibility Fabric in place, the systems and tools that were limited by the number of connection points, volume of traffic or by the network link speeds can achieve their full potential, thereby increasing ROI. Gaining visibility into the data center When you consolidate and virtualize servers to achieve better efficiencies, your data center becomes the nerve center of your institution. It houses your mission critical applications and highly sensitive patient records. You not only have to ensure the Corp Stores Private Edge Core Aggregation Access VM Clusters VISIBILITY FABRIC Web DB Packet APM NPM Recorder IDS Monitor Monitor Capture Figure 2: Implementing a Data Center Traffic Visibility Fabric acceptable. Monitoring and protecting the data center using a distributed approach is neither efficient nor cost effective. The key to improved visibility and hence the ability to protect the data center in an operationally efficient and cost-effective manner is to use a Traffic Visibility Fabric within the data center. Figure 2 shows how a Data Center Traffic Visibility Fabric can be implemented using a Gigamon solution. Your hospital network, wired and wireless, is the next critical factor in meeting your patient and employee expectations. 3

4 Remote Clinic Private Corp Wireless Access Points Scan Room Remote Patient Pharmacy Nurse Station Edge Core Aggregation Access Work Stations Remote Campus Remote Doctor VISIBILITY FABRIC Monitoring and Security Tools Figure 3: Implementing a Hospital Network Traffic Visibility Fabric Clinicians and patients depend heavily on this network not only are they using this network for hospital related activities, but also for their personal and social activities. Yet this is also the same network that is used to launch malicious or non-malicious security attacks on the network users computers as well as your data center. Loss of bandwidth, spreading viruses, leaked data, all lead to fingers being pointed to you and your team. Compared to the data center, your campus network is very distributed and hence it is even more important that you have a cost-effective way to monitor and protect this network. Once again a centrally managed Traffic Visibility Fabric will allow you to achieve your goals. Figure 3 shows how a Hospital Network Traffic Visibility Fabric can be implemented using a Gigamon products. This fabric can be an extension of the fabric that you implemented in your data center, so that you do not have to manage two separate fabrics. Conclusion Realize the benefits of the effort that you have expended on your infrastructure to meet your patient and employee expectations by implementing a Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric. The Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric will help you overcome the final hurdle to achieving your goals gaining network visibility by providing 4

5 you with a proactive approach that does not strain your budget. Enjoy the following benefits and peace of mind as you roll out your Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric: Prioritize traffic at the flow, packet or application level, so that the right information is sent to the right tool for optimum visibility and clarity. Deliver a single view across the physical and virtual worlds to correlate the two worlds without great effort. Extend visibility into the cloud allowing you to manage cloud-based resources. Direct the right information to IT management analytic tools, allowing you to spend less and to increase the return on investment in these tools. Help predict service degradation allowing your team to proactively address problems before users discover it. Quickly introduce new tools and monitor new applications to address the needs of the continuously evolving data center without waiting for lengthy change management processes. About Gigamon Gigamon provides intelligent Traffic Visibility Networking solutions for enterprises, data centers and service providers around the globe. Our technology empowers infrastructure architects, managers and operators with unmatched visibility into the traffic traversing both physical and virtual networks without affecting the performance or stability of the production environment. Through patented technologies, the Gigamon GigaVUE portfolio of high availability and high density products intelligently delivers the appropriate network traffic to security, monitoring or management systems. With over seven years experience designing and building intelligent traffic visibility products in the US, Gigamon serves the vertical market leaders of the Fortune 1000 and has an install base spanning 40 countries. Filter traffic to reduce the amount of data being sent to a tool, which allows you to reduce cost by using/re-using lower speed tools to monitor higher speed links. Eliminate SPAN/mirror port contention allowing you to easily replicate the appropriate data to multiple tools at the same time in order to eliminate data blind spots. For more information about Gigamon solutions visit: i. Ed Bennett, Found in Cache. < ii. Kerravela, Zeus. Service Management Strategies for Dynamic Networks. Yankee Group, Baseline normal behavior for capacity planning allowing you to plan for network capacity growth based on latency. Copyright 2012 Gigamon, LLC. All rights reserved. Gigamon, GigaVUE, GigaSMART, G-TAP, Flow Mapping are registered trademarks of Gigamon, LLC and/or affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. Visibility Fabric, Traffic Visibility Fabric (TVF), Citrus, and The Smart Route To Visibility are trademarks of Gigamon. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Gigamon 598 Gibraltar Drive Milpitas, CA PH