Care Provider System Improving Network Health with Infoblox
The Challenge – A Need to Enhance Security and Visibility
One of Europe’s leading healthcare systems, this organization faced a number of challenges with its existing network infrastructure used to power its DNS operations. A Microsoft deployment, the networking system was encountering performance issues as the organization scaled to meet new demands. A key issue was the need to have a highly-available platform that supported network, application and user growth. There was also a need to expand the robustness of DNS services to help support improved overall network redundancy.
The organization’s IT network lead explained that there was also a requirement to enhance security for both on and off premises users. With an increasingly hostile attack landscape, as cybersecurity risks continue to grow, the healthcare system wanted to make sure it was taking the necessary steps to secure its network and its users. Another key challenge was visibility. In particular there was a need to enable advanced application and user visibility for network traffic.
The Solution – Improving Network Management with Infoblox DDI
Working together with Infoblox, the organization’s IT team transitioned off of Microsoft and onto a comprehensive NIOS DDI implementation. In this way they were able to significantly improve their network operations, with better management across its data center, hospital and clinic locations. In fact, DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (IPAM) services—collectively known as DDI—have all been optimized thanks to the deployment of Infoblox Trinzic DDI appliances. The IT team lead explains that “together, Infoblox NIOS and the Trinzic appliances enable highly available services for the mission critical environments that we need to support.”
Customer: Healthcare System
Industry: Healthcare
Location: Europe
Initiatives: Enable high availability, Improve network management, Strengthen security posture
Outcomes: Greater accessibility, Better security for both on-premises and remote users, Enhanced network visibility
Looking beyond just optimizing the management of network addresses, the team looked to Infoblox to gain enhanced network visibility. Using the Infoblox Network Insight solution, the healthcare system has been able to better understand what is happening on its network and across its distributed address space. Their IT lead emphasizes that “for auditing reasons, it is great to have a reporting tool where DNS and DHCP data is collected and can be viewed and investigated at a later stage. With the increased visibility delivered by Infoblox, we’re now able to continually tune and improve network performance.”
The Results – Enabling a Healthy and Secure Network
As a healthcare organization, security has always been and will continue to be of great importance. Protecting the health of its patients demands that there is a robust network to support their life saving work.
With Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense, which provides a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model for security functionality, they are able to better identify and limit the risk of potential security issues. BloxOne Threat Defense provides their team with an extra layer of security that the organization simply did not have with its earlier Microsoft solution that Infobox has since replaced.
“There are multiple categories of threats that Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense can help us to defend against,” explains the IT lead. “In particular, we’re using Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense to help secure both on and off premises users from data exfiltration over DNS.“
Taking a Hybrid SaaS Approach with BloxOne Threat Defense
The healthcare system has benefitted from the ability to address both on-premises and cloud security thanks to the hybrid functionality and flexibility of the BloxOne Threat Defense solution. The SaaS solution has been a great asset during uncertain times with employees always on the move across healthcare facilities and partly working from home.
“With BloxOne Threat Defense, we have the solution we need to protect employees across that uncertain and evolving work environment,” states the IT lead. “We’re now able to detect, block and investigate malicious DNS queries in the earliest stages, thanks to the advanced features and machine learning capabilities enabled by BloxOne Threat Defense.” They add that BloxOne Threat Defense was fast to deploy and it’s easy to maintain. “We hardly spend any operational time on managing it, which is a great benefit to us.”
Extending Infoblox to Complement Existing Network Assets
Another key benefit of using Infoblox has been the ability to integrate multiple technologies together for common benefit. The integrations also help to enable improved automation and overall network security.
The healthcare system implemented the Ecosystem license, where security integrations Infoblox provide have also helped them strengthen their security posture and automate and integrate different solutions. For example, they integrated their privileged access management solution to their network access control solution, which has been a tremendous benefit in terms of eliminating unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data.
A Superior Customer Experience
Having Infoblox as part of the team to help secure the healthcare system has been a foundational component for its success. Their IT network lead emphasized that Infoblox has provided his team with very reliable and stable products and services which have helped him to meet challenges and deliver exceptional access and security for users.
Part of the experience has been the easy maintenance of the Infoblox solutions the team deployed, which ‘just work’ in the background, helping to enable network operations and providing enhanced security capabilities. “Overall, working with Infoblox has been a very smooth experience, and we’re all pleased with the outcomes and capabilities that Infoblox brings to the network. The Infoblox solutions have been very reliable and stable for us and we have had very good experience overall.”
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