How SASE Ensures Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Companies Thrive

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Healthcare and pharma companies are at the forefront of our most important need as humans: saving lives. To succeed, they require highly skilled staff members, medical equipment, drugs and resources. On top of these, there is another equally crucial component that will determine their ability to perform their jobs: their network. A secure, reliable and high performing network will ensure patient safety, data integrity and operational efficiency.

Such a network will enable healthcare organizations to protect sensitive customer data, connect medical professionals to patients through video, support the monitoring of patient data from IoT devices, set up effective communication between clinics, hospitals and other medical facilities, facilitate research and development processes, ensure proper distribution of drugs and medical equipment, and much more.

In this blog post, we introduce SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) and show how this innovative and easy-to-use technology can answer healthcare and pharma connectivity and security needs.

What Health and Pharmaceutical Companies Need From their Networks to Succeed

The healthcare industry is diverse, dispersed, susceptible to cyber attacks, and highly reliant on data and real-time communication. As a result, health and pharma organizations require the following from their networks:

• Advanced security measures that protect from breaches and can safeguard sensitive data, like ePHI.Healthcare networks are sought after targets for threat actors because they store and transit high volumes of valuable data and the distributed nature of healthcare means the attack surface is broad.
• Global connectivity across clinics, health centers, hospitals, pharmacies, remote medical personnel, telehealth centers and more.
• Low latency and network stability to support real-time and reliable communication. Using legacy network solutions like MPLS result in instability, fluctuating availability, and little redundancy. Multiple carriers result in inconsistent SLAs.
• Scalability to accommodate growth, including for new facilities, telehealth services and expanding digital health platforms.
• Support for compliance requirements, like HIPAA and others. For example, when there is no standardization across legacy tools, it is difficult for IT to meet compliance requirements like enforcing consistent policies to ensure patient data is secure, or even just tracking who has access to that data.
• Flexibility to support varying infrastructure and end-devices needs like IT and IoT.
• A positive user experience for both healthcare providers and patients, who are not always tech-savvy individuals, but they are busy.
• The ability to balance effectiveness with cost, since these organizations are often publicly funded and/or need to invest resources in patient care.
• The ability to support acquisitions of other healthcare companies and clinics.
• Ease of use for IT, since tasks are plentiful and time is short. In addition, the global skills gap is also prevalent in healthcare.

How SASE Can Answer Healthcare and Pharma Needs

SASE (Secure Access Service Edge), is an innovative networking and security solution that converges SD-WAN and security functions into a single, global, cloud-native solution. SASE was designed to reduce the effort and costs associated with setting up, maintaining and monitoring complex networks, while offering high-performing and secure connectivity. This makes it an ideal solution for healthcare companies.

For healthcare and pharma, SASE enables:

Enhanced Security and Compliance Posture

SASE integrates advanced security measures like FWaaS, CASB, DLP, SWG and ZTNA directly into the network. These measures allow granular control of data, ensuring it is securely accessed and shared. This reduces the risk of breaches and ensures compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, ISO 27001, or SOC2.

Optimal Performance

SASE optimizes network performance through SD-WAN, a global private backbone, and networking optimization capabilities. This ensures that healthcare professionals and researchers can quickly and reliably access the resources they need, regardless of their location, with minimal latency.

Scalability and Flexibility

SASE’s cloud-native design allows organizations to scale their network and security needs dynamically as they expand or adapt services. This includes opening new clinics or locations, adding new remote users or even onboarding newly acquired companies or facilities.

Simplified Management

By consolidating various networking and security functions into a single, cloud-delivered platform, SASE reduces the complexity of managing multiple security products and vendors. IT teams can easily enforce consistent security policies across all locations and users, including remote and on-site employees, through single pane of glass management.

In addition, IT teams gain full network visibility, which allows optimizing traffic and prioritizing applications.

Improved User Experience

SASE users enjoy fast download times and reliable connectivity to their applications, from video conferences with patients to sharing data during critical care situations. This is due to SASE’s private global backbone, which doesn’t rely on the internet, as well as advanced routing methods.

Operational Efficiency

SASE is a single solution for networking and security needs. The ability to eliminate network redundancies, drop expensive network lines and increased operational efficiency deliver high ROI for SASE, which helps prioritize patient care above all.

Global Connectivity

A cloud-based network and global network of PoPs allows connecting locations around the world while maintaining governance and visibility. High quality healthcare services can be provided without boundaries.

Conclusion

SASE delivers global connectivity, low latency, scalability, advanced security, compliance, flexibility, and a positive user experience. This enables healthcare and pharma organizations to overcome operational challenges, whether it’s connecting clinics across the country, protecting from ransomware, or transferring life-saving data in real-time. By choosing SASE, IT professionals in the healthcare industry are better supporting medical teams, which ultimately improves patient outcomes and their quality of life.

To learn more about how healthcare providers leverage SASE, click here.