Extreme Networks in Healthcare: getting a new lease of life

In a medical organization, IT network could be compared to a circulatory system – it simply needs to work, 24/7. To optimize critical healthcare operations and enhance patients experience, hospitals and medical facilities have traditionally relied on Wi-Fi connectivity. Whether it’s connecting workstations on wheels, barcode scanners, infusion pumps, or phones, the wireless network must simply be capable of connecting all Wi-Fi enabled devices needed for real-time clinical care.

A growing density of the network traffic is putting a significant strain on many healthcare organizations. Cordaan, one of the largest healthcare providers in the Netherlands, was one of them. “We needed a secure, agile, and resilient cloud-based infrastructure to cope with increased demand from thousands of personal and medical devices so our visitors and staff could continue to experience reliable connectivity”, says Rob Bergfeld, Manager ICT Services at Cordaan Group.

To ensure a reliable and scalable connectivity for staff, patients, and visitors, the organization decided to leverage next-generation, Wi-Fi 6 access points from Extreme Networks. These advanced wireless APs have been specifically designed to support high density environments. Despite the steady growth of bandwidth heavy medical IoT devices, applications and use cases straining the infrastructure, Extreme Wi-Fi 6 access points delivered exceptional experience, as well as seamless guest/patient device access and onboarding, at a value price.

Providing high performance connectivity to users and devices is one thing, but managing the increasingly complex network and maintaining its availability and fault tolerance is quite another. Especially when the capabilities and resources of the IT team are stretched thin, as it is often the case with healthcare organizations. Since reliability, scalability, and security are of the utmost importance in a mission critical environment like a hospital, a simplified, agile, and resilient network infrastructure is needed.

To streamline processes and simplify network maintenance, many healthcare organizations across Europe and around the world have decided to leverage the Extreme Fabric Connect technology to outstanding effect!

For example – upgrading and adding new devices and services to Cordaan's distributed network is now automated. The auto-configuration of the devices or users on the network helped to lower the reliance on IT specialists to run, maintain, and troubleshoot the network. Increased operating efficiency reduced the cost of network management, the pressure on the team and the risk of human error.

In case of the Elisabeth-TweeSteden (ETZ), one of the largest hospitals in North Brabant in the Netherlands, Extreme Fabric Connect helped significantly in the process of merging disparate locations into a single metropolitan-area network. “We wanted the same number of engineers to be able to service the organization (…) Using Fabric, migrations are now much easier and cause little to no downtime (...) Expanding new ports and switches to Satellite Equipment Rooms is much easier and doesn’t require configuring all the uplinks. The network does that all by itself, is much faster and more reliable with these tasks. We don’t require a high level of expertise and can expand standard parts of the network with less qualified, and therefore less costly, engineers”, says Dennis Groen, Senior Project Manager at Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital.

Extreme Fabric Connect also helped Groupe Jolimont, a leading health group in the region Wallonia, Belgium, increase network’s reliability and become less dependent on the assistance provided by external partners. “The users want perfectly functioning applications. In this context, availability is the only criterion. Therefore, the network must be fully redundant, but also performant, robust and secure. Moreover, we want to offer the same high service level on every site. The fact that we succeed in this – and that we manage our extended environment with a small team – is the biggest advantage Extreme Networks is offering us”, says Paul Tassin, responsible for the ICT infrastructure at Groupe Jolimont.

Since patient data and healthcare systems are lucrative prey (it’s estimated that health records are worth 20 times the value of a credit card), hospitals are targeted by hackers and bad actors a lot. But the risks of an insecure network and connected medical devices goes far beyond lost money – it’s about people’s lives!

With Extreme Networks, healthcare organizations can achieve the policy-based network access control and automation needed to validate and protect medical devices in real-time, and ensure patient safety, security, and privacy. Visibility into device communications, location, performance, and patterns of activity are vital to this. Extreme Networks solutions provide real-time application visibility and monitoring, whether they’re running onsite or in the cloud, to ensure that critical devices are working when – and how – they are supposed to.

For example, to keep advanced medical devices running safely and securely, ExtremeCloud IQ network management platform provides Cordaan Group with an end-to-end visibility and unlimited access to data, enabling its IT team to monitor and manage its expanding number of network devices and services. The healthcare provider can also harness the power of network segmentation to quickly spin-up secure Wi-Fi access for patients and staff as needed, separating critical applications and medical devices to protect them in the event of a potential breach.

For ETZ, protecting the older medical systems that lacked built-in security was also crucial in terms of capital expenditure. “(…) Extreme Defender for IoT enables protection of outdated medical endpoints and can be implemented between the network and medical devices that normally couldn’t be replaced or modified due to certification reasons. Since we take security issues very seriously, this solution can offer us enormous savings. If it weren’t for Extreme, we would be forced to either spend hundreds of thousands of euros on new equipment or build a separate network for this medical equipment alone”, says Franz Steinhauser, ICT advisor at the Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital.

Visibility and control is especially important in a multi-vendor environment. “(…) We needed a better control over our existing network infrastructure. Our Wi-Fi, for example, was running on OEM devices which effectively had no viable management system”, says Tomáš Walach, Head of ICT Department at Třinec Hospital in Czech Republic. Today, his IT team has great visibility into what is actually being connected into both wired and wireless network and is able to check for any unwanted devices and isolate any vulnerabilities inside the network. The delivered solution provides granular policy controls that enable Třinec Hospital to comply with policies and compliance obligations in a heterogeneous endpoint environment.

In today’s world, healthcare organizations must be able to deploy and onboard critical devices faster and with more efficiency, prevent cyber-attacks at every entry point, and – ideally – do it all while reducing operational and capital costs by maintaining the functionality of older, legacy devices and systems.

Easier said than done? Perhaps, but more than 3,000 satisfied Healthcare customers worldwide proves that Extreme Networks is able to deliver flexible, agile, and secure solutions that simplify the complexity of any modern hospital.