For centuries, healthcare workers have faced the daunting challenge of welcoming the sickest, most contagious patients through their doors, while at the same time protecting themselves and other patients from the pestilence du jour.  With the advent of modern tools such as antibiotics, X-rays, and quarantines, they were ultimately able to control most biological threats.

Today, healthcare plagues come not only from patients, but also from computer networks.  However, IT methods to identify and control infectious computer threats have often been more medieval than modern day.  The shortcomings can lead to data breaches and intrusions that compromise protected electronic health information, financial data, system integrity, HIPAA regulatory compliance and even patient safety. 

Further, hacker and malware intrusions into healthcare computer networks have created potentially life-threatening disruptions to healthcare applications and even intensive care unit (ICU) systems.  Aside from these consequences, such incidents have also frequently resulted in organizational fines, IT staff terminations and unwanted public scrutiny.

These risks can be unsettling for healthcare providers, whether they are a medical practice, a hospital, an insurance firm or any related participant.  There are a number of factors driving today's healthcare IT transformation, including:

• Regulatory compliance issues. 
• Increasing prevalence of electronic medical records (EMR).
• Expanded availability of advanced communication technologies.
• Pervasive computerization of patient care and back-office systems.
• Server virtualization technologies.

Reflex Security Solutions for Information Security in Healthcare Environments
Reflex solutions are ideally suited for healthcare environments and can help make the healthcare server room as safe as the operating room. They effectively protect the network perimeter, the multi-gigabit network core and virtualized server environments from hackers, mischievous students, criminals and other troublemakers.  Multi-vector threat detection prevents intrusions, data theft, denial of service, malware, spyware, rogues and more. 

• Advanced Security: Integrated intrusion prevention, antivirus, security information management, network access control, network discovery, host quarantine and more.  Facilitates interoperability and simplifies vendor relations. 

Patent-pending Reflex VSA™ secures virtualized server environments that may house protected health information, financial data or other sensitive information. 

• Easy to Use: Intuitive management and reporting tools maximize protection and manageability. Centralized control simplifies security management and staffing issues at remote facilities.
• High Performance: Secure throughput at up to 10 Gbps helps ensure support for the high-bandwidth requirements commonly found in healthcare or telemedicine environments.
• Reliable: High availability configurations and patent-pending Sentrium™ solid-state architecture provide rugged, dependable performance.  Redundant, load balanced configurations assure service levels for critical applications.
• Scalable: Reflex’s array of physical and virtualized appliance solutions readily adapt to large campus environments, distributed remote facilities, laboratories and more.
• Granular Security Policies: Reflex makes it easy to deploy granular security policies by VLAN, subnet, IP address range and more.  This makes it easy to accommodate unique security requirements that may be found in administrative offices, patient rooms, laboratories, medical offices and more. 

Reflex Security Customer Success Profile

The Challenge

• A large medical teaching facility needed to provide remote access for 1000 faculty, staff and student users, as well as large partner hospitals and diagnostic laboratories.
• Needed to protect network without restricting legitimate access.
• Limited security management resources.

The Reflex Solution

• Reflex IPS deployed at key network gateways.
• Configured to block malicious traffic and provide robust event reporting.
• Centralized management via Reflex Command Center.

Key Customer Benefits          

• Created an open, secure network environment.
• Increased network visibility and control.
• Reduced IT workload and cost.

"The Reflex IPS solution allows us to provide appropriate access to our network without putting sensitive information at risk.  It also helps us create a secure environment without incurring an unrealistic amount of work for our IT group.”  - ITS Security Director

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