Bluetooth tracing - Testing and monitoring - Berkeley Varitronics' Mantis wireless receiver - Brief Article

Communications News, March, 2003

Like most network managers, Texas Health Resources' (THR) Andy Sutton is committed to using advanced technology to address his organization's business problems. For Sutton, the core challenge was the range of issues spanning information technology and compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

THR is a large, non-profit healthcare organization in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, comprised of 16,000 healthcare professionals, and 13 hospitals and clinics serving 5.4 million people. THR runs many different medical and diagnostic applications within its WAN, including a physicians' portal called CareGate that provides a single point of access from remote locations to hospital information, healthcare applications, links to medical Web sites and resources, electronic mail, payer data and other services.

CareGate utilizes the latest security tools--encryption, authentication and firewalls--to enable hospitals and physicians to share data securely. Until THR discovered a secure WAN solution, however, providing physicians with secure Internet access to patient information and real-time diagnostics from their homes and remote offices posed a difficult challenge.

"Our goal was to provide physicians with secure, anytime, anywhere access to patient information to assist in making the best-informed medical decisions," Sutton explains.

THR's application portfolio consists of hundreds of healthcare applications developed by scores of vendors. Many applications are Web-based, but few were designed for secure access via the Internet. Sutton realized that it would be prohibitively expensive to provide remote access by retooling certain applications or duplicating others on Internet Web servers.

Sutton evaluated Array Networks' Array SP (Security Proxy) secure-access platform. The platform leverages expertise in multifunction Web-traffic management in a security proxy that integrates accelerated 128-bit SSL encryption/decryption and authentication, authorization and accounting. Sutton determined that the solution could be placed on THR's network in parallel to its CareGate physicians' portal to provide single sign-on access to existing patient care and real-time diagnostic applications.

"One of the product's advantages is no per user licensing, so we knew we could expand the solution without incurring additional license fees," says Sutton.

THR's secure access solution, which includes two clustered Array SPs at a cost of $49,995 each, compares to at least $150,000 for a VPN, not including the added costs of remote administration associated with a VPN. In addition, the solution works with existing networks, servers and applications, and does not require THR to customize its demilitarized zone or deploy additional Web servers. Additional applications can be rolled out instantly or with simple changes to the product's security framework.

Physicians with DSL or cable modem connections can access applications remotely with no performance degradation, and single sign-on capability requires just one password for secure access to multiple applications. The hardware-accelerated solution supports up to 5,000 new SSL connections per second and up to 32,000 concurrent sessions, so THR has not come close to tapping its maximum performance.

Sutton plans to use the Array SP to deploy healthcare applications for THR's thousands of physicians and eventually to provide employees with remote access to the company's intranet sites. "The device enables us to deploy secure Web-based services that we could not previously achieve," says Sutton.

For more information from Array Networks: www.rsleads.com/303cn-254