How to Overcome Complexity in a Healthcare Network

Healthcare organizations face unique challenges that demand both exceptional network performance and ironclad security. From ensuring patient data remains protected during transmission to maintaining seamless connectivity across multiple facilities, NetOps and SecOps teams in healthcare must navigate a complex web of regulatory requirements, sophisticated threats, and operational demands. 

It’s a high-pressure task. Network downtime can affect patient care, while security breaches can compromise sensitive medical records and violate strict compliance mandates. Traditional monitoring approaches often fall short in providing the comprehensive visibility needed to address these challenges effectively. 

The Healthcare Network Complexity Challenge 

Healthcare networks are inherently complex ecosystems. They must support: 

• Electronic health records (EHR) systems that require constant availability 
• Medical devices that generate continuous data streams 
• Telemedicine platforms connecting remote patients and providers 
• Research networks handling sensitive clinical trial data 
• Administrative systems processing billing and insurance information 

This complexity is amplified when organizations operate across multiple sites, from main hospital campuses to satellite clinics, outpatient facilities, and remote locations. Each site introduces new variables in network performance, security posture, and compliance requirements. 

Traditional network monitoring tools often provide fragmented views of these environments, making it difficult for teams to understand how traffic flows between locations, identify performance bottlenecks, or trace security incidents across the entire infrastructure. This fragmentation can leave blind spots that adversaries exploit and create operational inefficiencies that impact patient care. 

Long-Term Visibility: The Foundation of Effective Healthcare Network Management 

One of the most critical capabilities for healthcare NetOps and SecOps teams is long-term data retention that extends far beyond typical monitoring snapshots. These teams need the ability to maintain months or years of historical network flow data to meet a variety of operational goals. 

Trend Analysis and Baseline Establishment: Long-term retention enables teams to establish meaningful baselines for network behavior. By analyzing traffic patterns over extended periods, teams can identify seasonal variations, growth trends, and normal operational cycles that inform capacity planning and performance optimization efforts. This historical context is invaluable when distinguishing between legitimate traffic spikes and potential security incidents. 

Advanced Threat Investigation: Sophisticated attacks often unfold over weeks or months, with adversaries maintaining persistent access while slowly exfiltrating data or expanding their foothold. Short-term monitoring windows can miss these extended attack campaigns entirely. With comprehensive historical data, security teams can trace the full timeline of an incident, identify the initial breach point, and understand how threats evolved over time. 

Compliance and Audit Support: Healthcare organizations must demonstrate compliance with many regulations, from HIPAA to state privacy laws. Long-term data retention provides the evidence needed to prove that security controls were functioning correctly, that data was properly encrypted during transmission, and that access patterns aligned with authorized usage policies. This capability is essential during audits and helps organizations avoid costly compliance violations. 

Multi-Site Network Visibility 

Healthcare organizations rarely operate from a single location. The modern healthcare delivery model spans main hospital facilities, specialty clinics, outpatient centers, urgent care locations, and increasingly, remote patient monitoring scenarios. Each of these environments generates unique traffic patterns and presents distinct security challenges. 

Plixer One’s centralized approach to flow data collection and analysis transforms how teams manage these distributed environments. Rather than attempting to correlate data from disparate monitoring tools across different sites, teams gain a unified view of their entire network infrastructure. 

This centralized visibility enables several key capabilities: 

• Rapid anomaly detection tied to specific locations, allowing teams to quickly identify whether performance issues or security events are isolated to one site or represent broader systemic problems 
• Inter-site traffic optimization through detailed analysis of how data flows between locations, helping teams identify bandwidth constraints or routing inefficiencies that impact application performance 
• Consistent security posture validation across all sites, ensuring that security policies are uniformly enforced regardless of location 

IOC Contact Enumeration 

When a security incident occurs in a healthcare environment, speed and accuracy in response are critical. Patient data may be at risk, and regulatory notification requirements often mandate rapid assessment of incident scope and impact. Traditional investigation approaches can be time-consuming and may miss some affected systems. 

Leveraging flow analysis with Plixer One, teams can quickly determine the full scope of potential compromise. When investigating a suspicious host, domain, or other indicator of compromise, teams can rapidly identify every user, device, server, or application that communicated with the threat. 

This comprehensive visibility ensures that no affected system is overlooked during containment and remediation efforts. Security teams can: 

• Prioritize response efforts based on a complete understanding of which systems were potentially compromised 
• Accelerate containment by quickly identifying all communication pathways used by threats 
• Reduce the risk of persistent threats by ensuring comprehensive cleanup across all affected systems 
• Provide accurate impact assessments for regulatory reporting requirements 

The ability to quickly map all affected entities also supports more effective communication with clinical teams, IT departments, and executive leadership about the scope and severity of security incidents. 

Ensuring Data Protection: Encrypted Transport Verification 

Healthcare organizations handle some of the most sensitive data out there, from detailed medical records to genetic information and mental health notes. As such, protecting this data during transmission is a regulatory requirement under HIPAA and various other privacy regulations. 

But ensuring that sensitive communications are properly encrypted across complex healthcare networks can be challenging. Organizations must verify that: 

• Secure protocols are consistently used for transmitting patient data between systems, facilities, and external partners 
• Outdated or vulnerable encryption methods are identified and remediated before they can be exploited 
• Policy violations are detected when systems attempt to transmit sensitive data over unencrypted channels 

Plixer One provides the visibility required to verify encryption compliance at scale. By analyzing flow records and associated metadata, teams can confirm the use of secure protocols, such as TLS, and identify traffic that is unexpectedly unencrypted or using outdated cipher suites. 

This capability is critical for maintaining compliance with industry regulations and safeguarding patient data. Teams can generate reports demonstrating encryption compliance for audit purposes while proactively identifying and addressing policy violations before they result in data exposure or regulatory sanctions. 

Building Resilient Healthcare Networks 

Plixer One provides the foundation for healthcare NetOps and SecOps teams to understand, optimize, and secure their network environments. By combining long-term data retention, multi-site visibility, rapid incident response capabilities, and encryption assurance, healthcare organizations can build network operations programs that truly support their mission of delivering exceptional patient care while protecting sensitive information. 

Want to see how Plixer One can help you support your healthcare network? Book a personalized demo with one of our engineers today.