Today, IT departments in healthcare organizations are under tremendous pressure to become the enablers of a digital strategy. The network will play a key role in the shift to digital healthcare, as most of the enabling technologies—such as mobility and the cloud—are network centric. It’s time for the networks in healthcare institutions to evolve away from legacy architectures to a software-defined network.

The networks currently found in most healthcare organizations were designed for an era when application and compute resources were static and “best effort” service delivery was the norm. The networks were built on multiple tiers, were highly complicated and had long troubleshooting and repair times.

Building performance and reliability into the network often required overbuilding the network, which is why traditional networks have an average utilization rate of less than 30%, according to ZK Research. Additionally, the traditional networks were multi-tier in nature and were combined with older, inefficient protocols, such as the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). These networks were designed when almost all traffic flowed from the client to the server in a North–South direction. Again, this was sufficient in the past—but East–West directional traffic is growing 10 times faster than North–South traffic, and traditional architectures add far too much latency to the transactions. In the healthcare vertical, this latency can be the difference between a doctor having the right information to make a critical patient care decision or not. Clearly, a new architecture is required for healthcare institutions to meet today’s challenges.

A software-defined network (SDN) is a next-generation network that is simpler to build, easier to manage and highly agile, and it can scale as rapidly as the business requires. An SDN will perform better and have higher availability and scalability than traditional networks with improved utilization. SDNs in hospitals, clinics and other healthcare organizations will deliver many benefits to healthcare IT, including the following:

Network segmentation: This feature of SDNs, which is known as clinical segmentation, isolates specific departments and/or devices in their own virtual, private networks. The primary benefit to the IT department is that it is much easier to secure connected endpoints because each group of devices will be completely isolated from other devices. If there is a breach on a network segment, it will not impact devices on other segments.

Flow control: A software-defined network allows IT to monitor and control flows between devices with a high degree of granularity and apply them either by group or according to specific device policies. This enables IT to optimize the performance of specific flows, ensuring the performance of mission-critical systems—such as MRI and electronic records—aren’t affected by other applications.

Edge automation: As mentioned previously, the complexity of healthcare IT has increased over the past decade. The fact that the infrastructure now must support a large number of mobile devices only adds to the complexity. Many IT services require the network to be provisioned at the edge, often on a port-by-port basis. This was a challenge with static endpoints, but when the devices are mobile, network managers face the constant reconfiguration of every point in the network between the edge and the core. An SDN enables edge automation to ensure that each Ethernet port at every location can provide any service to authorized devices. In this scenario, all the intelligence is at the edge, and the network services are transparent to the core (Exhibit 2). This arrangement obviates the need for edge port provisioning, which can be costly and time consuming for the IT department. With an SDN, policies dictate which devices can be automatically added to the network, providing an additional level of security while allowing the medical staff to perform their required activities without IT support. This removes all human latency and speeds up processes, which can be the difference between patients receiving the medical attention required and being put at risk.

Inventory management: Healthcare IT must support thousands of mobile devices in addition to all of the traditional fixed devices, making inventory management difficult, if not impossible. An SDN provides detailed information on the types of devices, the location of the devices as well as the number of them. This removes from IT the burden of having to track the devices using spreadsheets or homegrown databases, which can be error prone and highly inaccurate.

Ease of management: SDNs offer northbound interfaces so the network can easily integrate with network management tools, which provides the IT department with a “single pane of glass” to manage the network. This shifts the management responsibilities from being complex, command line–driven tasks to being simple, task-based and policy-controlled operations in a rich, web-based interface. This change simplifies management but enables faster time to service with reduced complexity and less downtime from human errors.

 Single, end-to-end architecture: The various points in legacy healthcare networks—such as the core, edge and campus—were deployed and managed independently. SDNs change this paradigm by providing a single, unified architecture across the network, which can be located within a building or across a campus, or can even span the globe. SDNs provide a single architecture, offering the benefit of having one set of processes for one system.