Hospital EMEA

Faster network troubleshooting at high demand environment

Amstelland Hospital (Ziekenhuis Amstelland) is a general hospital for the region Amstelland in the Netherlands. It employs more than 800 people, including about 88 medical specialists.

Amstelland Hospital has implemented Flowmon network monitoring and security solution to provide insight into network traffic and analyze traffic behavior. With the aim of quickly detect anomalous behavior, which may indicate a cyber-attack or other security issues. Furthermore Flowmon helps meet the Amstelland Hospital to the new obligation to report data leaks.

Challenges

Network traffic is a “ blackbox“, no insight in volume or type of traffic
No detection of malicious behavior from internal medical devices
No compliancy with Dutch law on dataleakage
No rapid response possible in case of security issues

Key Benefits

Fast deployment
Extensive and detailed reporting
No time-consuming network monitoring and fast troubleshooting

Deployed products

Flowmon ADS
Flowmon Collector
Flowmon Probe

Situation

Amstelland Hospital uses Flowmon for all network traffic to and from the data center, Internet, DMZ and campus network to continuously monitor and analyze traffic centrally. In a cyber-attack or other security issues is rapid detection namely crucial. Also uses Amstelland Hospital the Anomaly Detection System (ADS) which is part of Flowmon. ADS keeps a profile of each connected device and detects on the basis of deviations which are due to malware or otherwise infected systems.

Solution

Hospitals are also responsible for the security of medical devices, which are connected more frequently to the network, and therefore vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Although medical equipment often has its own virus scanner it is not default on from side of the supplier. Flowmon still signals the threat on the basis of abnormal behavior. Also looking at potential data leaks and the law on this, Flowmon for us is an essential tool to provide the necessary insight into all traffic on the network.

"We called our network formerly a ‘Black Box’ because it was unclear what kind of traffic it turned. Regularly there were reports of applications were response was delayed, or that the network was slow. Sometimes we worked the traditional tools and used four to eight hours trying to figure out such issue. With Flowmon you can quickly pinpoint on latency. Discover an issue now costs only 15 minutes, or a factor of 16 less time.”, Wouter Kors, IT architect.