Case Study: Medical Technology Company

The medical technology company faced several challenges in managing network connections between medical devices deployed in the field and the company’s service staff. The company had to ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which required all connections between medical devices and the company’s servers to be encrypted. This involved creating and managing separate VPN tunnels for over 15,000 field-deployed devices. The company also faced network conflicts as the devices relied on the IT infrastructures of the medical centers and clinics where they were deployed. The devices were assigned IP addresses by the network teams of each facility, usually without any coordination. This introduced the potential that devices in different facilities would be assigned the same IP address, making remote monitoring and maintenance much harder to track. The company’s network infrastructure was complex due to multiple mergers, acquisitions, strategic initiatives, and partnerships. Maintaining visibility into the DNS of this complex enterprise was a significant challenge.

The customer is a leading medical technology company with nearly $20 billion in annual revenue and over 70,000 employees around the world. The company’s primary business is supplying hospitals and clinics with a wide variety of medical devices. All of the company’s medical devices require periodic maintenance. In the past, it employed a large team of Field Service Engineers which visited medical facilities on a set schedule to service and troubleshoot devices. In recent years, the company decided to connect all of its devices to the internet, enabling remote diagnostics and updates. This allows a smaller number of Field Service Engineers to effectively maintain a larger fleet of devices.