Summary
The health system faces the permanent challenge of having to cope with a growing number of tasks and ever tighter budgets and, at the same time, optimizing the quality of patient care. This can only be achieved with standardization, during the course of which individual solutions are largely disposed of. The IT infrastructure in particular is an area in which innovative processes need to be found in order to both simplify and optimize health care practice.
The highest possible security and the best availability of both the network and patients’ data are of central significance for the Tiroler Krankenanstalten (tilak, Tyrol hospitals organization). Highly sensitive data is stored and processed in many areas. In addition, the tilak is part of a wide network of institutions and partner companies (hospitals, training centres, private and social health insurance companies, university institutes, etc).
The tilak operates several networked locations and requires security technologies in order to distinguish these complex structures clearly and to prevent unauthorized access to the sensitive data. And all this was to be implemented on one unified infrastructure. A further challenge facing the IT infrastructure at the tilak was to mirror a complex organizational structure in the network architecture while at the same time keeping administrative overheads as low as possible. The Barracuda NextGen Firewall F-Series have proven its value here.
Open Structure vs. of Island Solutions
With the Barracuda NextGen Firewall F-Series all IP transfer oriented services such as proxy, mail gateway, firewall and DNS have been standardized and designed to be redundant in order to guarantee the highest availability possible. Additionally, the divisions with increased security requirements were segmented and provided with special protection. The various units in the network were then segmented by IP address and grouped in terms of costs.
This took account of both the complex organizational structure and also created cost transparency for the billing of the more than 700 cost centres.
Autonomy with Centralized Administration
With just a few clicks work stations can now be activated, temporary ac cess via VPN set up or other institutions such as health insurance companies linked into the network within minimum time. Despite the enormous number of mandates, work stations and users, the central administration team has a complete overview of all network processes as well as the status of the firewalls at all times thanks to the real-time and long-term statistics. Even the central security policy, software rollouts up to kernel updates no longer restrict the highly available operation of the network since this is all managed by the Barracuda NextGen Control Center and thus without any local intervention.
- Dr. Georg Lechleitner, IT Manager at tilak
IT Services for Improved Patient Benefits
"We completely implemented the new concept in roughly the space of one year and now have an efficient IT infrastructure which is equipped for future usage. As such, we are now able to operate like an IT service provider, beyond the boundaries of our own institution," comments Dr. Georg Lechleitner, IT Manager at tilak. The synergy effects combined with the low total cost of ownership have resulted in savings which relieve the public budgets and not least improve the benefit to patients.
About Barracuda
Barracuda provides cloud-connected security and storage solutions that simplify IT. These powerful, easy-to-use, and affordable solutions are trusted by more than 150,000 organizations worldwide and are delivered in appliance, virtual appliance, cloud, and hybrid deployments. Barracuda’s customer-centric business model focuses on delivering high-value, subscription-based IT solutions that provide end-to-end network and data security. For additional information, please visit barracuda.com.
About Barracuda NextGen Firewall F
The Barracuda NextGen Firewall F-Series is the enterprise-grade network firewall that combines comprehensive, next-generation firewall capabilities - based on application visibility and useridentity awareness - with optimal efficiency and throughput. Coordinated WAN optimization, centralized management, and cloud-hosted content filtering and reporting are just a few of the key features supporting enterprise requirements.
Barracuda NextGen Firewall F Fast Facts
- Powerful next-generation firewall
- Intelligent data traffic regulation and profiling
- Central administration of all the functions
- Integrated IDS/IPS
- Integrated IQoS- and Link-Balancing
- Predefined and Role Based configuration