Updated: Aug 11, 2025
Patient trust rests on your network. Ransomware targets hospitals because time pressure is real. You need controls that work every day, not promises.
Delivered as a Cisco Powered service by Proactive.
Fewer incidents, faster change, evidence on tap.
Her teams run EHR, PACS, and a new telemedicine wing. She worries about stale rules, TLS blind spots, and audit evidence.
He added two labs and a cloud LIMS last quarter. VPN objects and any-any rules piled up. Night calls rose. He wants fewer incidents and clean change.
Healthcare runs on connected systems, EHR, imaging, bedside devices, IoT, and SaaS. Every device and API increases the blast radius. Attackers know this. Do you know which flows you should decrypt, and which you must not touch?
You keep policy intent and console access. A named team runs the operation. That is the contract. What matters is how the day looks different.
Dr Meera scans the overnight log digest at 07:30. Three blocked egress attempts to unknown ASNs. One TLS break on a radiology viewer, auto-rolled back. No calls from wards. She opens the change requests queued for noon. Each one names an owner and an expiry.
Arjun approves a lab partner VPN change. The pre-checks pass. The template pulls the right tags, site, app, and owner. The runbook creates a rollback. The job lands in the 16:00 window. He stays with his LIMS rollout.
Both teams join a 15-minute review. Five numbers appear: policy to incident ratio, rule age, change success, mean time to detect, and mean time to respond. Miss a target, assign an action. No debates without data. Monthly, review exceptions created and retired, and the top noisy rules.
At 22:10, a vendor requests urgent access to a bedside device for a patch. The on-call engineer applies a time-bound exception with an owner and an expiry. Monitoring watches the session. At 23:40, the work ends. The exception auto expires. The exception record captures requester, approver, scope, start and end time, and session logs. No stale rules in the morning.
Week one: baseline rules, remove duplicates and shadows, tag owners.
Week two: set a safe decryption policy, list exempt clinical apps, and monitor break rate.
Week three: lock egress, add DNS sinkhole for known bad, place geo rules for risky regions.
Week four: join signals, firewall with identity and endpoint, use your identity provider, endpoint protection, and device management, and avoid hardwiring brands.
You now run policy as a product. Requests have owners. Changes have windows. Exceptions expire by default.
A 450-bed hospital saw TLS errors during PACS uploads and rising alert noise. We moved to a tag-based policy, set selective decrypt, and cleaned egress for imaging gateways. Incidents fell by half in six weeks. Mean time to detect dropped from 90 minutes to 12 minutes. Radiology uploads stabilised.
A city clinic network added kiosks and a teleconsult module. Any-any rules crept in. We applied week one baselining, added change pre-checks, and rate-limited chatty services. Tickets fell by about 40 per cent. Rollbacks took minutes, not hours. Doctors stopped calling the NOC during clinics.
Proactive operates the run as a Cisco Powered service. You keep control and final say.
What we bring:
You get fewer incidents, faster change, and audit-ready reports without adding headcount.
Book a 30-minute consultation with Proactive. We will review your firewall policies, your clinical flows, and your audit needs. Leave with a practical action list for the next 30 days.
