Software-defined networking can help IT staff members at health care companies to save money on network management and more easily meet compliance requirements due to its ability to automate repetitive tasks and enable network agility.
That’s the premise of a new white paper called “Frequently asked questions: Understanding the benefits of SDN in Healthcare” by Nuage Networks, the SDN startup backed by networking giant Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert).
SDN, as the paper explains, separates the network control from the forward plane of the network so network functions become more programmable and can be managed in a more granular way. That allows SDN to support faster new service and application creation, testing, and introduction than is/was possible with traditional networks, which require more manual processes related to set network elements. And, as Nuage Networks explains, because SDN centralizes policy management, it provides a single location for auditing and compliance reporting, and allows for more specific security safeguards to be implemented.
“This makes it much simpler for the IT organization to satisfy government compliance requirements, such as those mandated by the Affordable Care Act,” according to the Nuage Networks white paper.
SDN can also help with business continuity and disaster recovery, as it makes it easier for organizations to back up and restore networks. That’s because IT teams can create scenarios in which applications can be mirrored or moved to private or hybrid cloud resources, leverage virtual networks to scale between physical locations, enable applications and workloads to be based on hierarchical policy rules, and control and monitor the network across disparate physical locations via a single interface.
“The benefits of SDN are especially valuable to healthcare organizations because [they address] their needs for nimble applications development, reduced management complexity, enhanced security and simplified compliance, among others,” the white paper notes. “The opportunity is to begin deploying SDN now, to address today’s challenges with a solution that will position you strongly for future growth and innovation.”
Edited by
Kyle Piscioniere
