Co-Author Shyam Maniyar, Vice President, Engineering

The healthcare industry is undergoing unprecedented change. The pandemic has accelerated the process of digitization and the need for an always available and secure digital infrastructure. In particular, Healthcare IT (HIT) faces several significant challenges:

• Prevent security breaches across hospitals, clinics, and research centers
• Protect patient and research data through standards, integration, and governance
• Understand and support technological innovations in healthcare
• Provide simple, secure access to data and analytics to all key stakeholders

To address these challenges and support the connectivity and security needs of hospitals, branch clinics, and telehealth, HIT needs to build and maintain a resilient network architecture that is secure, automated, and provides a continuous feedback loop with rich analytics.

Cisco Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) is a network controller-based solution that helps organizations enable policy-based automation to address access control and segmentation. With its broad adoption in healthcare organizations worldwide, a set of use cases and best practices have emerged that demonstrate how HIT is using Cisco SD-Access to address changing network requirements and meet the needs of the healthcare workforce and patients.

Simplify Network Expansion

Healthcare networks in the modern all-digital world must provide service-level resiliency and be modifiable on demand. Cisco SD-Access provides ample support for site additions and site expansions and is flexible enough to spin up a new site in hours. It provides full lifecycle management of existing campus and branch environments in a simple and secure manner.

SD-Access starts with providing workflows for automating the physical network underlay using the LAN automation capabilities in Cisco DNA Center. Lan automation simplifies network operations and provides a zero-touch plug-and-play workflow. LAN automation can also quickly expand the network using extended nodes to spaces such as parking lots and warehouses.

HIT can build an automated network fabric and seamlessly connect external networks to the fabric borders. The network fabric also provides capabilities for HIT to connect their current networks to the fabric edges and extend security and segmentation benefits. SD-Access enables the creation of new branch and remote sites on-demand