Ensuring the health of endpoints in healthcare IT

Transcription

1 Ensuring the health of endpoints in healthcare IT Highlights Secure and manage endpoints across highly distributed environments, both on and off the network Automated continuous compliance against policies, aiding in reporting and ensuring standards such as HIPAA Gain centralized visibility and control across a vast array of devices and operating systems, regardless of bandwidth or connectivity From local multispecialty clinics to large national payers to government healthcare systems, the healthcare industry is in a continuous state of rapid growth, fueled by a global population boom. is also one of the most complex and highly regulated fields. The time and resources required to support initiatives such as electronic health records (EHR) and to provide healthcare workers with the technology they need to ensure the privacy and well-being of patients continue to mount. Behind the scenes, IT operations at healthcare-related organizations have been tasked not only with keeping a variety of mission critical systems running, but also with ensuring security and continuous regulatory compliance. With limited IT staff and budgets, many healthcare organizations feel hobbled with responsibilities that have grown too large and complex to manage efficiently and cost effectively. Physicians and other medical practitioners need immediate access to medical information through their endpoints.. And payers such as insurance companies rely on endpoints for the constant communication and connectivity required for conducting business in a timely and efficient manner. Because of these high-availability requirements, IT operation tasks need to be completed and validated quickly. The low bandwidth and high latency of distributed networks at many healthcare organizations, meanwhile, hamper endpoint management. Complex heterogeneous and legacy environments encompassing thousands of endpoints, such as roaming laptops, desktop computers, and diagnostic equipment, can be a challenge to adequately support without extensive manpower.

2 Maintaining healthy IT operations with IBM For healthcare organizations, accurate and timely maintenance of mission-critical endpoints can literally be a matter of life or death. From the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), or guidelines set forth by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), failure to demonstrate compliance with these and many other stringent regulatory mandates can severely impact operations of a healthcare IT organization. And as healthcare demand and costs surge with an aging population, IT staffing and support resources often remain static. Clearly, healthcare organizations must address a unique set of endpoint security, management and compliance challenges. To maintain a level of operational excellence, these organizations need a way to save time and resources while improving results for key areas such as software licensing, patch management, asset inventory and security configuration, in addition to ensuring compliance. IBM BigFix is a proven, powerful remedy for what ails many healthcare IT organizations. This solution s centralized and automated capabilities for distributed endpoint management provide visibility and control to support compliant, secure and responsive healthcare environments. Consider these results: A major healthcare provider replaced more than 1,000 Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager servers with one BigFix management server, while increasing patch compliance to 98 percent and reducing patch cycles from three weeks to two days. A US- based integrated managed care consortium with more than 230,000 endpoints used BigFix to vastly increase patching success rates and reduce the amount of labor required to apply patches to endpoints across the organization. BigFix for healthcare providers Medical transportation Hospital Physician laptop 3G Internet T1 line Data center T3 WAN Cable/ DSL Doctor offices and clinics BigFix helps healthcare IT operations better understand, control and manage the status and compliance of endpoints across the network. 2

3 An infusion of intelligence for endpoints at healthcare organizations In the healthcare industry that is becoming more instrumented, integrated and intelligent than ever before, BigFix helps healthcare IT operations better understand, control and manage the status of endpoints, whether they are located in the doctor s lounge, at the receptionist s desk, in the recovery room or at a payment processing call center. From network-attached servers and desktops, to internetconnected laptops and diagnostic tools, this solution has the ability to manage up to 250,000 endpoints from one location with a single management server, regardless of the endpoint s network connectivity. BigFix accomplishes this in a fundamentally new way. Traditional endpoint management solutions utilize endpoint agents that are entirely dependent on instructions received from a central command-and-control server an extremely slow approach that can fail when endpoints lose connectivity to the management server. The intelligent agent built into the IBM solution initiates updates and configuration actions only after determining if new policies are applicable to that specific endpoint, and automatically notifies the management server when status changes. Status messages are transmitted asynchronously to the management server, and the agent installed on each endpoint downloads relevant patch, configuration or other content to the endpoint only when necessary. As a result, the BigFix management server always contains current endpoint status, enabling real-time reporting from a single, centralized console. This intelligent agent-based approach provides significant advantages in speed, flexibility and scalability. The BigFix agent allows scheduling of patches or updates at times that are not disruptive for users, and is network-aware, supporting policies that help control traffic and conserve network bandwidth. Because the agent downloads changes only when needed, networks are not overburdened with service packs and other large files trying to make their way to thousands of endpoints simultaneously. Field office BigFix for healthcare payers T3 Central office T1 line Internet BigFix also benefits payers, saving time and resources while improving results for key areas of endpoint management including compliance, configuration and licensing. T3 Data center Field office 3

4 Case study: Gaining meaningful use dollars with improved security and audit reporting Infirmary Health System needed to automate and strengthen security and endpoint management to better protect data and meet HIPAA and meaningful use requirements. The organization deployed a comprehensive security solution from IBM that helps staff secure endpoints and better detect and respond to threats across the organization. With a unified security platform, Infirmary Health has met HIPAA and meaningful use requirements for data security, qualifying for a considerable amount of incentive dollars while significantly reducing security incidents. Attending to the unique needs of healthcare With numerous critical issues facing healthcare IT, maintaining endpoints at healthcare organizations can be a daunting task. BigFix can help address these challenges. Cost and efficiency: While the quality of patient healthcare is paramount, making sure it can be provided in an affordable and efficient manner is also a priority in the face of spiraling healthcare demands and costs. Manual, labor-intensive IT processes both increase the cost and complexity and decrease the efficiency of endpoint management. The challenge is to maintain high-quality IT service levels with limited, or perhaps shrinking, IT staff and budget. BigFix s single-console architecture offers streamlined, simplified tools to automate endpoint management, saving money while improving service delivery. Additionally, many unnecessary operational tasks can be eliminated and others significantly streamlined, resulting in abbreviated cycle times. Compliance requirements: While HIPAA is the most common healthcare compliance standard, providers must also contend with FDA 21 CFR Part 11, HL7, the EU Directive and other regulatory requirements. There simply is no option but to comply with these regulations in order to stay in operation, but how do you ensure that all endpoints are actually in compliance and report on them? BigFix can help secure and manage endpoints with sensitive data regardless of the type of device. It can quickly and efficiently produce compliance reports even over low- bandwidth connections avoiding the need to gather information in person at each location. By ensuring continuous assessment and remediation, it can replace slow, reactive compliance and audit procedures with faster, more effective automated processes. High visibility: In a distributed healthcare environment, it s hard to know what is installed on each endpoint, whether new software has been delivered and installed correctly, or which endpoints need which patches. Poor visibility also makes it difficult to manage compliance, and it exposes the organization to technology and business risks, including spending money on software that may be unauthorized or unnecessary. BigFix offers persistent discovery and visibility, ensuring that software is up to date, accurate and complete. The solution can gain visibility into any endpoint regardless of connection state. From a single console, you get an operational view into the infrastructure for comprehensive visibility and control. Operators can instantly see the configuration settings that need to be evaluated and the endpoints that are not compliant. 4

5 Continuous availability: organizations require continuous availability for mission-critical, life-saving systems. Devices in the emergency room operate as front-end data collection nodes that feed mission-critical information back to a variety of specialists, from radiologists to nurses and surgeons. To support high-availability requirements, operations tasks need to be completed and validated quickly and transparently. With the IBM solution, operators can schedule remedial actions on misconfigurations or unpatched endpoints and within minutes, receive validation that the action has completed successfully. This helps eliminate system or security breaches that could compromise data residing on an endpoint. Responsiveness: When healthcare networks stretch across a region, a country or the globe, infrastructures can struggle to keep up. Many systems run over low-bandwidth, high-latency networks. As a result, system and security management tasks such as software distribution can take up a high percentage of available bandwidth, slowing network performance and end-user productivity. With BigFix, processing is conducted on the endpoint itself. Having the assessment and analysis conducted on the endpoint increases the speed of endpoint discovery, software delivery, and validation, so IT operators can receive answers to inquiries on endpoints within minutes instead of hours, days or weeks. Heterogeneous infrastructures: endpoints often include a wide variety of servers and desktops, as well as laptops, tablets, kiosks, and wireless/mobile diagnostic equipment. They often run a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX and Mac OS. The IBM solution simplifies administration of heterogeneous environments including those with legacy systems and applications with the ability to manage endpoints running any of these operating systems. Toward operational excellence Today s healthcare organizations continue to strive for operational excellence while facing a unique set of IT challenges. IBM BigFix can help by empowering healthcare IT organizations to enhance endpoint compliance and security while saving valuable time and resources. By enabling improved endpoint visibility, new levels of automation, and centralized control from a single console, BigFix provides powerful tools for more responsive healthcare environments. Why IBM? With numerous critical issues facing healthcare IT, maintaining endpoints at healthcare organizations can be a daunting task. BigFix can help healthcare organizations of all sizes address these challenges, driving improvements in cost and efficiency, enhancing regulatory compliance and endpoint visibility, improving responsiveness, and supporting a wide variety of endpoints within a heterogeneous infrastructure, including those running Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX and Mac OS. The IBM solution simplifies the administration of these critical environments including those with legacy systems and applications. IBM understands that today s healthcare organizations continue to strive for operational excellence while facing a unique set of IT challenges. IBM BigFix can help by empowering healthcare IT organizations to enhance endpoint compliance and security while saving valuable time and resources. By enabling improved endpoint visibility, new levels of automation, and centralized control from a single management console, BigFix provides powerful tools for more responsive healthcare environments. 5

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