F5 is committed to being a "general practitioner" protecting hospital applications by taking a two-pronged approach of safety and reliability

At a time when all walks of life are experiencing a wave of digital transformation, the medical industry, as one of the industries most closely related to people's livelihood, is also actively embracing new Internet technologies and constantly exploring digital transformation.

With the normalization of the COVID-19 pandemic and the deepening of medical reform, Internet-oriented applications are increasing, and people's demand for health care is increasing, which puts higher requirements on the development of medical information-related applications. HIS (Hospital Information System) is the management center of the hospital. However, the HIS systems used by most hospitals today are modified and improved on the basis of the systems in the 1990s. They are relatively old and in urgent need of upgrading. On the one hand, there is the backward IT architecture of the hospital, and on the other hand, there is the growing demand for medical applications from patients. How to solve this contradiction has become the current task of medical informationization.

As a global leader in multi-cloud application security and application delivery technology, F5 is well aware of the challenges faced by the innovative development of hospital HIS systems and is committed to becoming a general practitioner in protecting hospital applications. By creating a series of leading products and solutions, it ensures the safe, fast and reliable delivery of core business systems such as hospital HIS. At the same time, it forms a comprehensive protection from the inside out, improves the security and reliability of the system, escorts important applications of hospitals, and lays a solid foundation for the construction of medical informatization.

Triple protection to achieve business continuity

Compared with other scenarios, hospital systems need to meet the needs of uninterrupted medical treatment. Whether the system can run 24/7 with high reliability to support business is very critical for hospitals. With advanced and reliable technology, F5 ensures the safe, fast and reliable delivery of core business systems such as hospital HIS, and brings the following three values ​​to hospitals in terms of ensuring business continuity:

1. High Availability

F5 uses custom programming scripts to fully simulate client requests, accurately forward client requests to the application process pool that needs to be accessed, conduct in-depth detection of the application service status, and accurately detect the health status of each process in the program pool through scripts. Once a process failure is found, it will immediately switch to other available servers to ensure the continuity of the HIS system. In this way, the hospital can accurately control the health status of the application process in the system without application modification, change the fault switching mode from manual to automatic, and change the fault switching time from hours to seconds, significantly improving the high availability and high reliability of the hospital's core HIS system.

In terms of ensuring high availability of object storage, F5 also has targeted solutions that can ensure the consistency of S3 object storage from delivery, operation and maintenance, monitoring to data analysis, provide imperceptible fault switching, and solve the inconvenience of manually switching access addresses when the hospital's object storage node fails.

2. Active-Active Disaster Recovery

As hospital businesses become increasingly dependent on IT, system failures caused by high-frequency, low-loss disasters such as misoperation and computer room failures will cause economic losses and adverse social impacts to hospitals. Many large tertiary hospitals need to build disaster recovery centers and perform data protection and storage in off-site disaster recovery areas. If you want to effectively use the IT resources of the disaster recovery center, you must consider the improvement of the utilization rate of IT resources in the data center and the shortening of RTO as much as possible, as well as the scalability and disaster recovery capabilities of the data center.

F5 deployed F5 intelligent DNS service in the core area of ​​the intranet of the two campuses to achieve dual-active of the intranet core application system based on domain name. The realization of dual-active of intranet HIS application can improve the utilization rate of IT resources in the data center by 50%, realize smooth switching of the intranet core system when "high-frequency and low-loss" failures occur, effectively improve the success rate of switching, and cooperate with automated scripts to keep the recovery time within 10 minutes. In addition, F5's solution can realize online maintenance of core systems such as HIS, reduce the workload of operation and maintenance, and effectively save IT costs.

3. Visualization

With the development of hospital business, there are more and more application systems, but the operation status of the systems cannot be monitored in real time. Once a problem occurs, the operation and maintenance personnel do not know how to troubleshoot it.

To address this issue, F5 combines traditional data infrastructure components with new big data components, using real-time data processing and analysis capabilities to effectively reduce the time for application failure recovery. The big data engine is combined with open source ELK to achieve T+0 real-time data collection and report display. Without any additional cost investment, it collects application system operation and maintenance data and generates reports, realizing modern operation and maintenance based on big data analysis from the "network operation and maintenance level" to the "application operation and maintenance level".

Comprehensive security protection from the inside out

There are many information systems in hospitals, and any disaster may cause system downtime, medical data leakage, hospital business interruption, hospital disorder or even operational paralysis. F5's solution covers the entire network from the intranet to the Internet connection boundary to the outermost registration system, fully ensuring application security.

In the intranet, F5 has solved the problem of the complexity of the hospital's existing network and the difficulty of accessing security devices due to the multiple mesh links between the core switch and the aggregation switch by coordinating security devices such as firewalls and IPS. F5 excels in processing application layer protocols, helping to solve the application architecture that is difficult for security devices to adapt to, providing users with better application delivery services, integrating hospital intranet security devices, and improving the traditional candied haws string architecture into an intelligent and programmable architecture, quickly bypassing security devices to restore business.

At the Internet boundary, services are uniformly released through F5 or NGINX PLUS, and the real server address is hidden to improve security. F5 or NGINX PLUS selects access to different services based on the domain name HOST and URI to solve the problem of insufficient public network addresses. Through AWAF or NGINX App Protect modules, the security of Internet boundary applications can be effectively protected to meet the requirements of Information Security Technology 2.0.

For the external registration system, by loading certificates on F5 and locating individuals through the client source IP inserted by third-party channels, and adding active robot protection functions to detect and intercept automated tools, malicious registration behaviors can be effectively prevented, business system security can be strengthened, and adverse social impacts caused by scalpers grabbing numbers can be avoided.

Today, the medical information industry is in a stage of rapid development, and a secure and reliable business system is not only the foundation of medical informationization, but also the technical support for solving the problem of "difficulty in seeing a doctor". F5 will continue to explore medical scenarios, grasp the needs of hospital informationization, focus on solving the core problems in medical informationization technology and application fields, ensure the safe, fast and reliable delivery of the hospital's core business systems, and bring more value to the medical industry.