I had the privilege of sharing a virtual stage with Karl Brown from VMWare this past month. Karl is a Director of Product Marketing and an eloquent spokesperson on technology trends. Karl and I explored the emergence of a new healthcare delivery architecture involving diverse points of care varying from clinics to specialty practices to retail clinics to patient homes. Healthcare providers too are dispensing care from offices and homes using telehealth tools. All of that means, healthcare delivery is truly distributed now.

In non-hospital caregiving settings, we acknowledged the prevalence of varied infrastructures supporting an exponentially growing number of connected devices. The idea of Quality of Service (QoS) that may have faded with larger Internet pipes into hospital settings has come roaring back due to the many connected telehealth (video) and medical IoT devices and real-time applications in the mix.

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Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN), which has become a mainstay for improving application performance and security in the distributed enterprise world, can do the same for healthcare delivery architectures with these expanding points of care. By assuring critical application performance at all times and across all locations consistently, such healthcare delivery can be transformed. Karl detailed the underlying technology of SD-WAN that makes this possible, through examples of voice and video traffic gains.

SASE Answers CIO Concerns

In a recent collaboration with Third Horizon Strategies, Hughes spoke to 10 CIOs across the healthcare landscape. These CIOs of well-known health systems talked about the challenges of securing an exploding number of locations and connected devices on their networks. The complexities kept them up at night. And they feel stretched to stay knowledgeable about the increasing list of platforms and devices in play, as well as to find the right expertise to create a cohesive operating environment.

Karl and I emphasized that the SASE framework offers a path for addressing such heterogeneous security challenges (Related: Learn more about the link between SASE and your network security here). Numerous threat vectors demand multilayered solutions that are deployed and orchestrated so policies and configurations can be centrally managed and automated.

From premise-based solutions to “zero-trust” options to application-specific user controls, a true SASE implementation offers CIOs the peace of mind they’re seeking. As part of our presentation, we shared a set of options to help construct a possible SASE framework. Of course, since SASE is a newer concept, it’s a work-in-progress for the entire industry.

This is where we advocated for a Managed Service Providers (MSP) to shoulder the burden and simplify network complexity, allowing healthcare providers to focus on care delivery. We shared how Artificial Intelligence and AIOps are emerging as next generation network management technologies to quickly identify and fix anomalies and issues that threaten to impact network availability and application performance. The right solution coupled with an experienced MSP can go a long way in addressing healthcare’s most pressing IT challenges when it comes to delivering care at the edge.

Check out the video for the full presentation.

About the Author

 

Rohit Tripathi focuses on new market development and is currently working on the future of edge computing, AI/ML and DevOps in the distributed enterprise context.