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Enterprise Wireless

Paul Thomason, Jaime Sanchez, Aida Seidou, Sahar Sumrean, Ryan Williams

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Problem and Background

Business Problem: Deploy a new wireless network on healthcare campus without disrupting operations

●Campus has approximately 20,000 devices on the network at any given time including medical and other important IoT devices

●Costs of inaction/reasons for change:

○Rapid growth of IoT in healthcare

○Increasing high bandwidth activity on the guest network

○Ensuring uptime and security

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Special Concerns in Healthcare

●Retrofitting older facilities

●RF Interference

●HIPAA

●Critical health outcomes

“In a healthcare setting, the network has to be extremely reliable because it’s literally life or death… You have to plan coverage capacity, backup systems, and application intelligence just to make sure that things work - and that they work 24/7.”

-Rick Reid, Aruba Networks Product Marketing Manager

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Radio Frequency Interference

●Reasons for RFI:

○Increasing numbers of electronically controlled medical devices with inadequate electronic protect against RFI

○Significant increase in the number of RF sources in the environment

●Some medical devices are especially sensitive to the type of digital modulation that certain wireless communications devices utilize

RFI on ECG

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Protecting Against RFI

Techniques for protecting against RFI:

Shielding

Filtering

Grounding/Bonding

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Solution: Shielding

●Boyd Corporation’s EMI & RFI Shielding Solution

○ROHS Compliant

●Shielding material used:

○Aluminum

○Copper

○Copper alloy

○Pre-tin plated steel

○Conductive tape foil

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HIPAA

●To remain compliant with HIPAA, organizations must safeguard patient and client private information from security threats

●The larger the budget and resources allocated to IT security personnel the better an organization can deal with these threats

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Device Density in a Life or Death Environment

●High and rising

●“An average hospital room will have between 15 and 20 medical devices, and almost all of them will be networked”

●Currently it’s important to manage the wireless network with a focus on IoT

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SWOT Analysis: Cisco vs. Aruba

	Strengths	Weaknesses	Opportunities	Threats
Cisco	-Broad existing knowledge base -Current system already uses Cisco equipment which is backwards compatible -Reliable equipment -Guest network can be isolated	-Poor compatibility with other systems	-Room for growth and upgrades -Cisco offers paths to move in various different directions -Highly expandable within the Cisco world	-Expensive
Aruba	-Easy deployment -Extremely secure -Offers the only controllerless wifi solution -Flexible network management	-Time consuming maintenance -Complicated troubleshooting -Lackluster product support	-Less expensive	-No usage guides