Healthcare Solutions

Aruba's Unified mobility Network for Healthcare

What's your vision? To help your hospital become a true center of excellence when it comes to patient care? To enable your doctors and nurses with the very best technology, extending the effectiveness and efficiency right at the point-of-care? To create a truly ubiquitous network that securely serves every care provider, administrator and patient, everywhere, on any device, exactly as they need?

Aruba has pioneered a new approach to help you achieve your vision. Aruba's Unified mobility Networks integrate adaptive wireless LANs, identity-based security, and application continuity services into a cohesive, high-performance system for healthcare campuses, clinics, physician and home-offices. The result is a centrally managed network that mobilizes healthcare applications across the LAN, WAN and the Internet making users more productive without negatively impacting security. In contrast to other solutions, Aruba's Unified mobility Network overlays on top of existing networks, preserving existing investments and preventing disruptive network changes.

The Aruba Networks Healthcare Industry Solution

The Aruba solution consists of a few key components - thin Access Points (APs), central Mobility Controllers and software modules for the Mobility Controllers, and optional management analytics and threat prevention appliances. APs provide secure wireless connectivity to devices and connect over existing LAN/WAN systems to tunnel all wireless LAN traffic (over a GRE or IPsec tunnel) to a Mobility Controller installed in the data center. The Mobility Controller is the central point of configuration, management, application continuity services and security. With security modules for Mobility Controllers, Aruba offers the necessary security for regulatory compliance. Following is an explanation of a wireless network in a healthcare environment with centralized IT services:

Data Center: One or more master Mobility Controllers are installed in the data center, which can be used as the central configuration and management point for the entire global network. These Controllers can also terminate APs used for wireless connectivity on the main healthcare campus and remote APs used by telecommuters and home offices. A Master Controller can support up to 500 remote Controllers and can also back-up a controller in a remote location in the case of an outage. To scale for larger deployments, multiple master Controllers can share the load of managing local Controllers and APs in remote sites, and the Mobility Management System (MMS) can be used as the single interface for management and configuration.

Ambulatory Facilities / POB s / Large Clinics: Depending on the number of APs required in each location, a different model of Aruba Controllers (called local controllers) is installed. All Aruba Controller models run the same software and have the same functionality, but differ in AP capacity - from 4 to 512 APs. Each local controller gets its configuration from the master Controller. Application continuity and security policies are enforced at a per-user level by the local Controller. Different user roles are applied based on group policy defined in the authentication infrastructure and guests can be tunneled outside of the network to terminate in the DMZ. Local Controllers also offer Wireless Intrusion Protection security and can provide local authentication services and/or pass through requests to the data center. Each local Controller automatically calibrates the RF coverage to optimize application performance and fill any coverage holes. Further, to extend wireless coverage in areas that are hard or costly to wire, Aruba APs can back haul over Wi-Fi using its award-winning secure enterprise mesh technology.

Physician and Home Offices: Remote APs are a cost-effective solution to provide secure and centrally managed wireless connectivity to locations that only need one or two APs. Remote APs can connect directly via Ethernet to a public/private Internet connection or to the LAN. Remote APs automatically discover the master Controller, establish a VPN tunnel back to the data-center and extend secure wireless connectivity to the user. Application traffic can be tunneled back to the data center or bridged locally.

The Aruba Advantage:

• Follow-me connectivity: Provides ubiquitous access in hospitals, clinics, physician and home offices
• Follow-me security: Ensures patient confidentiality and HIPAA compliance
• Application continuity: Uninterrupted services for the mission-critical healthcare environment
• Lower TCO: High performance, integrated platform for healthcare that eliminates the need for extra devices