Healthy Networks, Healthy Patients: The Power of Observability in Healthcare
by Dennis Carpio, Head of Global Alliances & Channel
In the modern healthcare landscape, the seamless operation of network infrastructure is critical for ensuring reliable and secure patient care. With healthcare systems growing increasingly complex, the need for robust network visibility, security, and operational efficiency has never been greater. cPacket’s observability platform provides healthcare organizations with the essential tools to address these challenges, enabling them to monitor and secure their networks in real time, optimize performance, and improve patient outcomes.
Let’s explore how cPacket’s Observability platform has revolutionized healthcare IT infrastructure in three key areas:
1) Essential Network Visibility & Analytics
Like most mission critical network environments, in healthcare, every packet counts. From patient data transfers to medical device communication, healthcare providers rely on fast, secure, and uninterrupted network operations. cPacket’s observability platform excels in providing precise network analytics that give healthcare IT teams deep insight into network performance and health. With real-time monitoring, the platform allows administrators to detect anomalies, troubleshoot issues, and prevent potential bottlenecks before they disrupt patient care.
High resolution network analytics enable healthcare organizations to gain detailed visibility into every aspect of their network, from device-level communication to application performance; on-prem or in the cloud. With the ability to track TCP flows and pinpoint network delays, healthcare IT teams can take proactive steps to optimize performance and mitigate risks associated with network downtime, which could have a direct impact on patient care. This level of insight is essential in an environment where reliability and speed are paramount.
2) Improved Operational Efficiency
Healthcare organizations must navigate unique challenges, particularly in the realm of medical imaging and secure network segmentation. cPacket’s observability platform simplifies these challenges with features specifically designed to enhance operational efficiency. DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the standard for transmitting medical images and related information. PACS (Picture Archiving and Communciation Systems) rely heavily on the DICOM protocol. With cPacket’s platform, healthcare organizations gain comprehensive visibility into DICOM traffic, ensuring that large imaging files are efficiently routed across the network. By monitoring DICOM communications in real time, IT teams can identify how much DICOM traffic is traversing across their network and what systems they are connected to, ensuring smooth operation and avoiding delays that could compromise patient care.
Additionally, cPacket’s support for Cisco TrustSec enhances network security and segmentation.
By providing header stripping in its packet brokering solutions, cPacket enables the removal of TrustSec encapsulation, allowing monitoring and security tools to analyze traffic more effectively without the additional overhead introduced by TrustSec tags._
cPacket solutions also focus on high-performance, feature-rich packet processing at line rate, ensuring that TrustSec traffic can be properly analyzed and handled without packet loss or performance degradation. This capability is particularly beneficial for organizations that rely on TrustSec for network segmentation and security policy enforcement while maintaining full visibility into network traffic.
3) Optimized Security Tool Stack
In healthcare, security is a top priority. With the increasing number of connected medical devices and IoMT endpoints, the need for a robust security infrastructure to protect sensitive patient data is more important than ever. cPacket’s packet brokers play a key role in optimizing the use of advanced healthcare security solutions such as IoMT security, CPS (cyber-physical systems) and NDR (network detection & response).
Vendors such as Armis, Claroty, Cynario, Forescout, Nozomi Networks, Ordr and others focus on securing IoMT devices and industrial control system (ICS) security, particularly relevant for hospitals with advanced medical devices and automated systems. By using cPacket’s packet brokers to aggregate and filter network traffic, healthcare organizations can ensure that these security tools receive only the most relevant data. This enhances the performance and efficiency of the security tools, enabling them to operate at their full potential without being overwhelmed by excessive or redundant network traffic.
Furthermore, cPacket’s packet brokers can provide these security tools with deep visibility into network traffic, allowing them to detect threats, vulnerabilities, and anomalous behaviors in real time. With packet brokers handling the data aggregation and filtering, the security tools can operate more effectively, identifying potential risks before they compromise patient safety or privacy. And with the addition of packet capture capabilities, these security tools can also perform historical forensics monitoring based on current indicators of compromise.
Conclusion
In an era of increasing digitalization, healthcare organizations must ensure that their IT infrastructure is not only secure but also reliable and efficient. By leveraging advanced network analytics and a wholistic approach to network visibility using packet brokers across all parts of your environment, healthcare organizations can navigate the complexities of modern healthcare networks with confidence. As the healthcare industry continues to embrace digital transformation, adopting solutions like cPacket’s observability platform is critical for ensuring the seamless delivery of patient care, improving operational efficiency, and maintaining the highest standards of security.
