Just like many other industries embracing digital transformation, the healthcare sector is also on a transformative journey. Many local hospitals and clinics that were once buried in paperwork have hopped aboard the digital train via the cloud. This move is motivated by the goal of improving patient care, making patient information easier to access by patients and their families, enhancing treatment outcomes, and streamlining business operations.
Unfortunately, streamlining networks, effectively investing into the cloud, enhancing security, and integrating AI pose distinct challenges for the already busy healthcare sector. Juniper Networks alleviates those worries so healthcare workers can focus more on their patients than their computers.
Juniper Network’s Five-Point SD-WAN Strategy
Juniper Network’s AI-powered SD-WAN, utilizing the Juniper Session Smart Router and Mist AI, enhances software-defined WAN capabilities for advanced healthcare networks. It handles edge traffic, optimizing performance and cost-effectiveness while eliminating the need for tunnels, thus meeting rigorous healthcare industry standards. This empowers healthcare organizations to expedite cloud migration, which improves operational efficiency for better patient care. These benefits span various digital healthcare applications, including:
- Cloud Services
- IoT Systems
- AI In Medicine
- Telehealth
- Smart Facility Management
1. Enhancing Healthcare Security And Compliance With A Cloud-Centric Solution
The adoption of public cloud for healthcare involved transmitting protected health information (PHI) over the internet, which posed major security risks. To comply with regulations like HIPAA, HITECH, and GDPR, healthcare organizations are now embracing cloud-based security solutions to enhance data protection.
Juniper's Secure Vector Routing delivers security and hyper-segmentation without the traditional encryption protocols. This technology offers several features:
- Deny-All (Zero Trust) Routing implements a zero-trust approach for every network connection.
- URL Filtering blocks malicious websites and content.
- L3/L4 Denial-of-Service (DoS)/Distributed DoS (DDoS) Protection maintains system and service integrity in the event of cyberattacks.
- Payload Encryption protects data and other sensitive information during transmission.
- Network Address Translation (NAT) And VPN Functionality enable secure communication within the healthcare ecosystem.
Implementing these measures reduces data loss, mitigates malicious attacks, and boosts trustworthiness for both PHI and IT infrastructure.
2. Guaranteed Network Availability With AI-Driven SD-WAN
Network failures can disrupt patient-saving care and daily healthcare operations. Organizations are now turning to AI-driven SD-WAN to maintain uninterrupted access to critical applications during cloud migrations and mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) activities.
Juniper’s Mist AI ensures network availability through the following means:
- Traffic Steering optimizes data flow for healthcare applications.
- Session-Aware Routing operates at the network’s edge to reduce latency.
- Failover Protection redirects traffic through alternative paths in the event of a link failure or ISP outage.
- Service-Centric Routing simplifies migration of workloads to the cloud and the integration of networks during M&A activities, without service disruption or complex router configurations.
These features help healthcare organizations maintain critical application functionality and reduce disruptions. This is especially notable during an era where many healthcare organizations across the country are working through M&A.
3. Optimizing Healthcare Experiences By Meeting SLAs
Efficient IT operations in healthcare improve service quality and user experience by intelligently managing traffic, maintaining service levels, and using AIOps for issue detection and resolution. Juniper Mist AI is leading the way to ensure service quality and user satisfaction through the following:
- Traffic Prioritization based on user application requirements. In healthcare, there are many clinical and non-clinical applications with varying degrees of requirements.
- Tunnel-Free Architecture for enhanced network visibility and efficient end-to-end session monitoring.
- WAN Assurance, which provides users with metrics to assess healthcare workers’ experiences.
- Marvis Virtual Networking Assistant to deliver comprehensive insights for IT users to quickly identify and address issues.
4. Streamlining Healthcare Network Expansion
Expanding healthcare networks, especially during complex mergers and clinic location expansion, is a challenge. To enhance agility, healthcare organizations should prioritize cost-effective routing protocols and centralized network configurations.
With Juniper Mist Cloud, IT operators can simply manage the entire network stack (wired, wireless, and WAN) from a single platform. This streamlined setup includes zero-touch provisioning and advanced templates for quick deployment at multiple sites and clouds – something WEI is very familiar with.
5. Maximizing Cost Efficiency
Cost containment in healthcare IT goes beyond saving money; it's about future proofing. Juniper Network’s AI-powered SD-WAN streamlines network and cloud migrations, so organizations can enjoy cost savings and improved data transmission efficiency. In a time where ROI metrics are more pivotal than ever, IT teams can accurately forecast these savings for major cloud and network migrations. This translates well to other key stakeholders within a healthcare organization.
The resulting cost savings free up IT budgets for innovation, a vital aspect in an ever-evolving healthcare sector.
Final Thoughts
Juniper Network’s solution empowers healthcare IT leaders, delivering exceptional network experiences for clinicians, staff, and the patients they serve while simplifying operations and enhancing security. Thanks to Session Smart Router and Mist AI, it optimizes performance and cost-effectiveness, ensuring fast and secure data access and migration. This allows healthcare workers to focus on operational efficiency and top-quality patient care.
To dive deeper into Juniper Healthcare IT Networking, reach out to WEI and discover the future of healthcare network management.
Next Steps: Whether you are responding to evolving workloads and performance needs or changing scalability and resiliency requirements, chances are your enterprise will undergo a data center migration at some point. Download our white paper, Simplifying Your Data Center Deployment And Management Strategy and learn:
- The challenges of inevitable data center migrations
- How to incrementally build and validate blueprints
- How Juniper Apstra executes your intent
- Apstra automated data center deployment service
