As a large healthcare system, this Akamai Guardicore Segmentation customer is responsible for protecting their patient data and more than 6,000 assets from potential threats.
Although the organization planned to migrate several of its critical workloads to Microsoft Azure, its IT stakeholders found themselves facing several roadblocks to successful cloud adoption.
Their current environment had several existing security risks, including a relatively flat network in which medical IoT devices had unmonitored access to the data center and significant BYOD use. This meant a possible breach could result in a significant lateral spread that could compromise patient and payment data in other business-critical applications. With little isolation, it also made proving compliance to auditors a manual task of combing through exhaustive security logs.
Equally frustrating was a lack of visibility into the traffic and application dependencies that were undermining attempts to move workloads to Azure.
The Challenge
The Solution
Remediating the organization’s current visibility and security challenges using VLANs or firewalls would have meant coordination and significant effort among several already maxed-out teams to execute required network changes.
So, when the Guardicore team was able to demonstrate a software-defined segmentation approach that could granularly map out their diverse environment and consistently apply segmentation policies to workloads on-premises and in the cloud, stakeholders secured the budget, and IT leadership moved forward with a purchase decision.
The Results
Because Akamai Guardicore Segmentation uses a software overlay approach independent of the underlying infrastructure, the customer’s security team was able to accelerate the segmentation project independently, limiting the impact on other groups in IT.
With the new platform, the organization was able to quickly ringfence critical applications and tightly restrict device access to the data center with no downtime or need for any application or network changes. Using the new visibility into real-time and historical data, the organization can also now easily prove to auditors that all regulated assets are effectively isolated. Today, the company manages its data center security with only two employees.
Finally, by mapping application dependencies and creating the necessary policies, the healthcare system was successfully able to achieve its cloud adoption goals while also ensuring that any future workload migrations to the cloud remain just as secure.
About Akamai
Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence. Learn more at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on X and LinkedIn.
