St. Dominic Memorial Hospital Mobilizes Patient Care with Aruba Switching, Wi-Fi 6 and Security Solutions

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE), today announced that St. Dominic-Jackson Memorial Hospital, a 571-bed acute care facility in Jackson, Mississippi, has standardized on Aruba wired, wireless – including Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) – and security solutions to deliver superior care to patients, improve productivity for its 3,000+ nurses, doctors and skilled caregivers, and ensure a secure connected experience for the almost 15,000 mobile and IoT devices on the provider’s network.

St. Dominic’s comprises a large main campus of 12 buildings, as well as approximately 35 associated clinics. The provider had previously deployed Aruba access points and mobility controllers, as well as the ClearPass Policy Manager and AirWave network management, as part of a multivendor network that also utilized Alcatel switches. The IT team determined that it was time to upgrade the organization’s switching infrastructure, as well as address one of its key concerns moving forward – visibility of devices on the network and the mitigation of security threats. After evaluating solutions from Cisco, incumbent vendor Alcatel, and others, St. Dominic’s determined that Aruba could better address the full range of its wireless, switching and security needs.

"It was important for us to ensure a smooth integration of new equipment into the existing network infrastructure to minimize disruption, simplify management of the network, and keep costs low,” said Murray Farrar, Infrastructure Architect for St. Dominic’s. "We’ve had a great experience with our Aruba wireless, AirWave and ClearPass solutions and felt that Aruba could deliver a complete package, from wireless to switching to security, and enable seamless integration between all the elements.”

With the help of channel partner, Pileum Corporation, St. Dominic’s deployed additional Aruba access points, including new Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 APs, Aruba access switches at the edge, and IntroSpect, to integrate with the organization’s existing ClearPass solution, bringing increased visibility and security into the network. St. Dominic’s also completed a Proof of Concept with the Aruba 8320 Series core and aggregation switches and plans to replace their existing core switches with the Aruba gear.

With the wireless network becoming increasingly critical for both internal operations, as well as patients and guests, the IT team had deployed ClearPass to segment and manage the traffic, assigning roles to each device depending on type of device and who is using it, so they can easily differentiate, for example, between a medical device in a patient room and an iPad in the visitor lobby, giving each the right level of secure access. With the new Aruba switches in place, the IT team plans to leverage ClearPass to segment its wired traffic as well.

The integration between ClearPass and IntroSpect was crucial for St. Dominic’s as they grapple with more IoT devices such as IV pumps, heart monitors, and other medical equipment on their network, and the need to ensure that these devices won’t compromise security.

Matt Smith, Security Architect for St. Dominic’s noted, "Introspect gives us a more complete picture because it’s looking at all the traffic. We’re able to gain visibility into the behavior of devices on the network and – via the tight integration with ClearPass – take immediate action such as quarantining or removing questionable devices from the network. IntroSpect is helpful not just for security purposes, but also to resolve non-security related problems such as applications that are being dropped at a particular firewall or server, or conversations that are being dropped by a specific workstation.”

Smith noted that St. Dominic’s uses a secure messaging app called Cureatr for communications between nurses, doctors and other hospital staff and with IntroSpect, they can easily view and quantify usage of the application including number of users and most popular times of day for usage, allowing the IT team to adjust their downtime and maintenance around these parameters and minimize interruptions.

"More importantly, IntroSpect has improved our ability to view, respond and resolve security events, and has reduced response times from days down to minutes,” Smith said. "We’ve experienced an order of magnitude improvement. Where previously, half a dozen people might spend a day working on a security event, we can now make a determination in less than five minutes that makes our organization safer.”

As St. Dominic’s looks ahead, the IT team foresees a continued increase in IoT devices and new applications on the network. To address these continuing challenges, the provider plans to evaluate ClearPass Device Insight which uses machine learning and crowdsourcing to automate discovery and fingerprinting of all connected devices on any wired or wireless network, User Experience Insight, to deliver mobile user application assurance and troubleshooting, and Aruba’s Dynamic Segmentation, which will unify policy enforcement across the wired and wireless network, keeping traffic secure and separate.

Said Farrar, "We have a small IT team and can’t afford to spend our cycles on tasks like trying to script security behavior. Aruba’s combination of wireless, wired, management and security solutions supports our long-term goal of a cohesive, integrated network that meets our IT team’s – and our hospital’s – needs, and ultimately, allows our staff to deliver the best patient care possible.”

About Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is a leading provider of secure, intelligent networks that enable customers to thrive and deliver amazing digital experiences in the mobile, IoT and cloud era. We are changing the rules of networking to make it simple for IT and organizations to bridge the physical and digital worlds at the Edge.

To learn more, visit Aruba at http://www.arubanetworks.com. For real-time news updates follow Aruba on Twitter and Facebook, and for the latest technical discussions on mobility and Aruba products visit Airheads Social at http://community.arubanetworks.com.

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