Industry Trends
Across the globe, organizations have been reevaluating current strategies to ensure uninterrupted business continuity – and this is especially true for the healthcare industry. The need for available, real-time emergency services not just within hospitals, but also at remote locations is stronger than ever. To meet demands for rapid field diagnosis and testing, healthcare organizations must ensure their networks can keep up while remaining secure. Without a secure emergency deployment plan in place, these organizations will struggle to scale vital operations when faced with adversity.
For healthcare workers to appropriately respond to emergencies while ensuring business continuity, they must have seamless, secure access to centralized medical records and devices, no matter their location. When remote work is a factor, especially in locations where telemedicine is in place, it is a given that infrastructure, capacity, and coverage requirements will vary from place to place. Solutions must be in place to ensure security, reliability, and manageability combined with consistent enterprise controls.
While establishing a consistent level of security across environments is critical, it can also be challenging to achieve. Most cybersecurity solutions are architected to secure a single environment, and struggle with expansion in terms of establishing and coordinating consistent policy enforcement across multiple sites. This is especially true for hybrid environments comprised of distributed clinics, hospitals, and doctor’s offices running across a variety of physical and virtual networks. For this reason, healthcare organizations may find it difficult to scale security for consistent enforcement from the data center to the cloud and out to a remote site.
Optimized connectivity of both data and clinical-support devices between locations requires advanced identity management integrated with a comprehensive security solution. This enables a comprehensive and complete array of protections along the entire data chain. In addition to providing essential security services, healthcare organizations must ensure that those same tools are also scalable and cost-effective, especially in times of immediate need.
Below are five considerations for healthcare organizations looking to overcome the barriers associated with the cost and complexity of provisioning and maintaining secure Wi-Fi access and VPN connectivity at remote sites.
To meet the changing demands of the healthcare industry, Fortinet offers an integrated solution designed to support remote environments, whether they are part of an ongoing strategy or an emergency deployment. This fast, scalable, cost-effective solution can be quickly deployed at small or temporary mobile healthcare sites to offer the same level of security and networking functionality that the larger hospitals and clinics depend on.
In addition to the secure endpoint connectivity features provided by FortiClient, there are four main components in this solution that work together to secure remote access and maintain business continuity.
The integration of these components into a unified Fortinet Security Fabric ensures a consistent level of security and policy enforcement across the entire distributed healthcare network, which not only helps accelerate threat response, but also ensures the safe and rapid transmission of critical patient care information. Additionally, this integration makes it easier for healthcare IT teams to increase security controls as needed.
The healthcare industry’s ability to respond quickly to emergencies is more critical than ever. To do their job, healthcare workers across hospitals, remote clinics, and even temporary care operations – and everything in between – need immediate access to critical medical information at any time, no matter where they are. By deploying a comprehensive solution that features ease of deployment, cyber threat controls, and unified management, healthcare organizations can secure access for even their most distributed care centers without compromising network performance.
Discover how Fortinet Teleworker Solutions enable secure remote access at scale to support employees with a wide array of access requirements.
Learn more about enabling the latest advances in patient care while protecting against cyberattacks with healthcare cybersecurity.