Medical Technology Company Streamlines Operations with BlueCat's Network Automation

A leading medical technology company with nearly $20 billion in annual revenue and over 70,000 employees worldwide faced a complex challenge in managing network connections between its medical devices and service staff. The company had recently connected all its devices to the internet for remote diagnostics and updates, but this introduced several issues. Firstly, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), all connections between medical devices and the company’s servers had to be encrypted, requiring the creation and management of separate VPN tunnels for over 15,000 field-deployed devices. Secondly, the devices, deployed in various medical centers and clinics, were assigned IP addresses by the network teams of each facility, often without coordination, leading to potential IP address conflicts. Lastly, the company’s network infrastructure, shaped by multiple mergers, acquisitions, strategic initiatives, and partnerships, was complex and difficult to manage, especially with the recent adoption of AWS cloud for much of its internal compute.

The customer is a global medical technology company with nearly $20 billion in annual revenue and over 70,000 employees worldwide. The company's primary business is supplying hospitals and clinics with a wide variety of medical devices. These devices require periodic maintenance, which was traditionally done by a large team of Field Service Engineers visiting medical facilities on a set schedule. However, in recent years, the company decided to connect all of its devices to the internet, enabling remote diagnostics and updates, and thus requiring a smaller team of Field Service Engineers to maintain a larger fleet of devices.