The edge revolution for healthcare is already well underway. According to the American Hospital Association, there are between 15-17 devices per bed in American hospitals, with as many as 13.8 million total devices in use. Roughly 25% of these devices today are networked - and this is just hospitals. As advances in healthcare technology progress, especially with the advent of silicon able to process artificial intelligence right at the edge, we can expect this number to grow significantly.
Edge processing - where computing occurs locally in a healthcare facility or in the patient’s home if under monitored care - is the only way all these devices will be able to come together in order to make timely, actionable decisions.
Healthcare devices and data are challenging:
- Security and proper handling of the data are critical for both ethical and legal reasons.
- The amount of data can be overwhelming. Some imaging devices produce local files as large as 6GB. Data on this scale is difficult and inefficient to move to the cloud. Processing this data locally becomes incredibly important.
- The number of connected devices is very high, and so many of these devices are quite unique. According to WHO there are an estimated 2 million different kinds of medical devices in use across the world.
The healthcare space comes with significant mandates for security. Izuma Networks cloud and edge stacks help you meet compliance needs for your solution, whether this be the HIPAA Security Rule for electronic protected health information (e-PHI) or similar regulations in different jurisdictions.
Strong cybersecurity is fundamental to meeting the HIPAA Security Rules for e-PHI. Edge systems also present a second challenge in security: they are decentralized. This decentralization means that, unless properly configured and managed, your attack surface area can be significant. Essentially any edge machine could be a security risk.
Izuma Networks defense-in-depth strategy provides you with significant protection at the edge. This includes:
- Strong encryption (dual handshake TLS) between all edge sites.
- Device identity protection and verification for each edge system using hardware root-of-trust security, such as TPM 2.0, when available.
- A built-in SD-WAN between edge machines and your Izuma Cloud, which allows edge machines to have very tight firewall security locally, and can have them route all traffic through the Izuma Cloud services to have thorough control over ingress and egress traffic.
Learn more about Izuma Network’s Edge Security capabilities
Having more localized facilities offers the promise of providing faster, better care and better access to underserved communities. That being said, more locations can also be more difficult for IT teams to manage.
Izuma Cloud with Izuma Edge running on remote servers at each location can help IT teams scale as they add more locations while needing distribute applications for local access. More on Remote Branch Office use cases.
New processors from leading vendors, such as NVidia, allow edge computing to do what could only be done on supercomputers a few years ago. This includes advanced analysis using artificial intelligence, to provide immediate feedback to clinicians.
Izuma Networks Edge-as-a-Service can deliver these new types of applications to hundreds or thousands of edge machines, across the Internet, securely. Our systems make it easy to provide continuously updated AI models to all your edge computing machines - allowing machines doing deep AI based analysis to have latest models needed for the best analysis. For more - look at our device edge solutions.
