Baptist Health Discharged Security Vulnerabilities with the Adoption of Stable, Supported NIOS DDI
“We love the one-button upgrades Infoblox provides, and above all, with Infoblox, we simply no longer have to worry about reliability issues or security vulnerabilities crippling our network.”
Baptist Health is one of the largest, not-for-profit healthcare systems in Kentucky.
The company owns five acute-care hospitals with more than 1,500 licensed beds in Louisville, Lexington, Paducah, Corbin, and La Grange and manages a 300-bed acute-care, hospital in Elizabethtown.
Baptist doctors, nurses, administrators, and staff rely on the IT network to perform daily business functions and support applications that allow them to provide the best care possible for their patients. Essential to maintaining availability of the IT network are domain name resolution (DNS), IP address assignment (DHCP), and IP address management (IPAM) services.
The Challenge
Identifying a Solution that Checked All the IT Requirements
Baptist began looking at Infoblox in 2005. At the time for DNS and DHCP services, Baptist Health was using Nortel’s NetID. While Baptist liked Infoblox products, they were not in a position to purchase or replace their existing infrastructure until 2007 when the Nortel product was reaching end of life.
Customer: Baptist Health
Industry: Healthcare
Location: Louisville, Kentucky
Objectives: Replace sunsetted DNS and DHCP solution. Eliminate service interruptions. Prioritize a vendor with product upgrades.
Results: Nonstop service availability. Greater redundancy and reliability. Fewer security vulnerabilities. Built-in IP address management
Products : NIOS DDI
The IT department had been following the development and evolution of Infoblox appliances and knew Infoblox would be on the short list of appliances they would consider.
In 2007, Baptist narrowed its replacement options and conducted a 9-month comparison. The following is a list of several important requirements considered during the evaluation:
- Stability, redundancy, and the user interface; Baptist weighted stability as most important. The IT department also prioritized a feature-rich product.
- Tech support, company strength, and compliance reporting/audits and alerts.
- Conversion, disaster recovery and cost.
The Solution
A Clear Winner in Infoblox’s Unified Network Services
“One of the things we liked was that Infoblox was the first to market with their core network services appliances,” said Mark Flynn, Lead Network Engineer, Baptist Health. “We knew that there would be a strong DNS component given that Cricket Liu was a part of the development team. We liked Infoblox’s strong lineage and that they have been part of the evolution of DNS.”
“When we initially reviewed the other products, their claims and features looked nice,” said Flynn. “However, the products were difficult to use and cost quite a bit more than Infoblox.”
By mid 2009, the Baptist IT department completed testing. The scores were tallied and Infoblox was the clear winner.
Baptist purchased and deployed 2 Infoblox appliances for each hospital for redundancy and 2 Infoblox appliances for its main datacenter to serve as Grid Master devices, all connected and managed as a unified system with Infoblox Grid technology. The conversion to Infoblox went off without a hitch.
The Result
A Stable, Up-to-Date, and Worry-Free Network
In June 2009, the Infoblox appliances were fully installed. Baptist converted to a stable and supported product that allows for updates with the click of a button.
Concluded Flynn: “Healthcare IT is evolving and becoming more real-time. In healthcare, we cannot afford down-time with our network. With our old systems, we frequently experienced interruptions requiring NetID service restarts. And, unfortunately, for many years we were vulnerable to DNS- related issues because we were not running the latest release of BIND. Now, using Infoblox appliances in high availability pairs, and taking advantage of the company’s Grid technology, we have an added layer of redundancy in our data center. We love the one-button upgrades Infoblox provides, and above all, with Infoblox, we simply no longer have to worry about reliability issues or security vulnerabilities crippling our network.”