In reply to Vince.

Vince: Not sure if you have had chance to read Part 2 of this blog series yet, but many of the healthcare leaders I speak with are in a similar situation as yourself, using Infrastructure Segmentation – firewalls in front of whole VLANs full of medical devices.

While this has proven a good stop-gap measure while we all wait on medical device manufacturers and the FDA to implement changes, this approach has proven to be inflexible since one usually cannot take a medical device from one hospital ward or building and connect it easily at another location without first adding its MAC address, and IP address, etc. to an ACL somewhere, defining permitted ports and protocols along the way. This static segmentation is also proving to be a pretty expensive overhead every time someone needs to add or remove a device to a secured VLAN.

A firewalled VLAN also doesn’t address the inter-device threats where one device may become infected or compromised, which spreads to all other devices in that segment. What many healthcare leaders are aiming for is ‘micro-segmentation’ where each device is isolated from each other device or system right the way across the network unless specifically authorized.

Hopefully, Part 2 of this article will provide you and many other healthcare CIOs with a better alternative, regardless of what manufacturers and the FDA do. Here’s a shortcut dlvr.it/NwphVY