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Uninterrupted patient care for eleven years and counting
Published: April 12, 2024
ADRZ | Healthcare | The Netherlands
ADRZ, a healthcare organization in the Netherlands, works tirelessly to maintain accessible, quality care throughout the region, where distances are large between populace areas. In an environment like this, seamless connectivity and network uptime, robust security, and operational efficiency are a must. To ensure that, ADRZ has relied on Extreme solutions since as early as 2012.
ADRZ is a regional healthcare organization in the Dutch province of Zeeland – southern-west part of the country. Today, after a merger of two hospital foundations back in January 2010, it operates three facilities located in Goes, Vlissingen, and Zierikzee. In addition to general care departments, the organization runs a large emergency department that is vital for ensuring acute care for patients. ADRZ also works together with general practitioners and other healthcare institutions in the region to improve the quality and efficiency of care in Zeeland.
More than 2,250 employees, 180 medical specialists, and 140 volunteers at ADRZ treat and care for hundreds of patients daily. Running an organization of this size efficiently requires smart ways for driving better operational effectiveness. In ADRZ’s case, this need is further compounded by the fact that Zeeland is sparsely populated, and young people often leave to live and work in other provinces, making it increasingly challenging to maintain staff and resource levels for many businesses and organizations, healthcare or otherwise.
This is where the technology came into play.
The headaches that required attention
Network infrastructure at hospitals, clinics, care centers, and other healthcare facilities can be compared to a blood circulatory system in a human body – it's best to take great care of it. Alas, the ‘traditional’, legacy networks that many healthcare organizations still rely on, can often be a source of some major headaches, including:
- Many time-consuming and labor-intensive manual configurations. Traditional networks are largely configured switch by switch. In today’s hospital environment, where new devices and applications are moved, added, or changed frequently, manual configuration is time consuming. This is why ADRZ needed better network scalability to support the increasing number of users, devices, and applications.
- Slow network recovery. Traditional networks require administrators to understand and configure many interdependent protocols. This complexity can slow network recovery because each layer is reliant on the layer below it to re-establish connectivity. Manual configurations also introduce the risk of a network outage resulting from a human error. This is why ADRZ looked for a solution that would help maintain 24/7 operating network for a 24/7 operating hospital.
- Vulnerability to breaches. In legacy networks, separating different types of traffic has traditionally required multiple VLANs with access controls and firewalls. However, if you are sharing a routing table, your IP network is flat and if someone breaches your network, they might make their way through lateral movement to patient health records or – even worse – life-critical devices like insulin pumps. This is why ADRZ wanted their new network solution to ensure proactive security.
Extreme Fabric Connect – more than a decade of simplicity and reliability
With the help of the Extreme Fabric Connect solution, the IT team at ADRZ was able to dramatically simplify the network edge and automate the attachment of users and devices. This was critical since the hospital environment includes thousands of clients at any given time. With the new fabric-based network, hospital staff can self-provision their own devices and connect them to the network without the networking team even getting involved – they don’t need to worry about what port they’re plugged into or making sure it has the right security.
Since adding and removing network services in the new fabric network only needs to be done at the edge, and is typically done from a centralized management system, mistakes are far less likely and the network is much more stable. In fact, ADRZ has been enjoying a 24/7/365 operating network for eleven years and counting, meeting constant demands of the dense hospital environment.
The core network of our hospital hasn't been down for about eleven years now. Never failed. That's what Extreme is delivering.
Mark van Strien, Senior Network Administrator, ADRZ
Staying safe and secure with Extreme
Supporting thousands of devices on their network, ADRZ also needed a reliable way to isolate medical equipment to prevent potential security risks. Extreme Fabric Connect provided a secure solution without compromising the much needed simplicity by allowing a policy-based, end-to-end hyper-segmentation. Having a network that can be segmented easily and at scale helped the IT team at ADRZ to improve their security posture by dramatically reducing the attack surface and preventing lateral movement to more sensitive areas of the network.
The ability to scale network without extra IT personnel or additional solutions. The built-in automation that eliminates human error. An inherently secure way of how the network itself is built and operated. This is how ADRZ has been addressing the challenges of healthcare industry for more than a decade!