Your Network Keeps 10 W
HAT’S THE biggest difference between a high- availability healthcare network and a high-availability business network?
No one dies when a high-availability business network
goes down. A little extreme, you think? Not really. Healthcare
network availability has taken on more importance as network convergence has turned hospitals into dense networks of sophisticated, computerized medical gear. Take the network away and you’d be left with a lot of dumb devices that cannot perform the life-saving functions for which they were designed. Because of the lifesaving nature of the networked
devices, healthcare institutions need networks that are different from ordinary business networks on almost every level. Whether it’s the basic power infrastructure, the core, the wireless portion, or the wide area network (WAN), the network has to be designed to never go down, to accommodate fluctuating workloads, and to meet a variety of other requirements peculiar to healthcare institutions.
More Than Your Data Alive The Difference Between Healthcare and Business IT BY AL GALLANT
Times Have Changed The set of requirements for healthcare network
availability has been changing since the late 1980s. That’s when the term convergence emerged on the network scene to describe how vendors were combining multiple services though a single vendor or provider. Usually, this meant the merging of telecommunications
services with data communications services. Simply put, the typical network switch/router vendor could offer Voice over IP products, providing the convergence of voice and data over a single network infrastructure. It was a revolution. The typical business CIO found this proposal a smart way to eliminate dual wiring infrastructures. Why build separate infrastructures for voice and data when a single data infrastructure could do it all? Convergence in healthcare networks had a much
slower start than it did in business networks, but after 2000, healthcare networks started changing the core meaning of convergence. Convergence now is defined as a process where technologies with distinct purposes merge and overlap. Not only are healthcare networks embracing telecommunications and data communications convergence, but now biomedical devices are also merging and overlapping.
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CONNECTION
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