The EnGenius Cloud managed Wi-Fi solution is an excellent option for healthcare providers who need to maintain HIPAA compliance requirements over their managed Wi-Fi networks.
Data, Data, Everywhere
The increase in technology use in conjunction with medical and healthcare companies has created a new twenty-first century health experience that allows the quick and easy transmission of medical data. From stored medical data to the use of IoT medical devices that automatically update patient records, there is more patient information zipping around networks and the internet than ever before. And it is growing exponentially. Records that used to take days to move from one facility to another can now be transferred in seconds, and doctors from around the globe can monitor patient information in real-time.
With this advance in medical technology and data access comes a new issue: medical data security. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted specifically to allow health facilities the ability to adopt new technologies while still ensuring patient information privacy.
What are the HIPAA Compliance Requirements?
HIPAA is a law passed by the federal government of the United States that defines the exact standards for data privacy with regard to patient healthcare information (PHI). Any entity that collects, holds, transmits, or accesses personal patient health information must maintain this set standard of data protection for all physical, network, and process measures that touch PHI data in order to ensure HIPAA compliance. HIPAA compliance standards cover not only data storage, but also the transmission of data, access to data, logging information about the data usage, and controls on both remote and physical access.
The types of organizations that must maintain HIPAA compliance requirements include health care providers, insurance companies, medical facilities (such as hospitals, residential communities, and medical service providers), and anyone providing treatment, payment, and operations in healthcare. Anyone who does business with these entities that comes in contact with physical or network areas that control PHI data also need to be compliant.
HIPAA is mandatory. There are severe penalties both legal and financial for not following HIPAA protocols to the letter.
HIPAA Compliance Requirements and Wi-Fi Networks
Increasing, on-premises Wi-Fi service is an important tool for medical facilities and providers. It allows doctors, patients, and devices the ability to access crucial data and ensure the best and most immediate care. When used in conjunction with PHI, Wi-Fi networks are required to follow HIPAA regulations. Even more crucial, as many business services and infrastructure (such as Wi-Fi) are moving to a managed cloud model, security concerns can grow – is your medical data safe in the cloud?
Enforcing security policies can be a daunting task for regular Wi-Fi admins, but with medical data there are obviously serious repercussions to any breaches in data security. Unfortunately, not having Wi-Fi access isn’t really an option. What can you do?
EnGenius Cloud has the answer.
EnGenius Cloud Meets Your Wi-Fi (and Data) HIPAA Compliance Requirements
The EnGenius Cloud managed Wi-Fi solution is fully able to meet HIPAA compliance data standards and ensure that your Wi-Fi network can move PHI data where in needs to go without jeopardizing security.
EnGenius Cloud provides the exact features that guarantee that data, access to data, and the transmission of data won’t compromise security:
EnGenius Cloud’s dual band (2.4G/5G) access points can broadcast up to eight SSIDs simultaneously. Each SSID has its own security and access control. This includes the ability to use EnGenius Cloud Radius and an external Radius server to authenticate users with unique username and password via a captive portal with a splash page. EnGenius Cloud also provides a log that grants network administrators insight into user client device operating systems and their connection history and activities.
EnGenius Cloud only handles the management plane of network devices. User data goes straight through the Cloud devices, and EnGenius Cloud devices stay on and up even if the EnGenius Cloud becomes inaccessible.
Communication between cloud devices with EnGenius Cloud is based on secure SSL tunnels, and to further enhance security a two-factor authentication (TFA) process is required before a tunnel can be built between devices. EnGenius access points (AP) support WPA3 Enterprise with 192-bit security “Suite B”, WPA3-Personal, WPA2 Enterprise with 25-bit AES encryption, and WPA2-Personal.
Administrators of customer networks can see the logs of user devices associated and dis-associated, authenticated and de-authenticated, and all roaming time stamps.
Administrators can identify users and the time of any configuration changes. Administrators can also provide user privileges to multiple organizations and networks, and review system and change logs.
Administrators have a unique account (email address) and password, which can manage thousands of organizations and networks with a single sign-on. Administrators can invite, modify, or delete additional administrators and/or read-only users.
EnGenius Cloud provides event settings and email digest. Administrators can customize system event notifications to receive alerts to see devices that went offline, duration times, and configuration changes. By scheduling an auto-report generator, reports can periodically be sent to the administrator’s email account.
EnGenius Cloud is a serverless cloud architecture that manages cloud resources automatically based on system utilization. This means the cloud scales up or down automatically to meet the needs of a particular client. This serverless architecture provides a highly resilient infrastructure, with data stored in different regions for guaranteed disaster recovery.
Since there are no hardware-based controllers that manage cloud devices, there is a greatly reduced risk of failure from a physical network. The Wi-Fi management architecture is ALWAYS up.
Your healthcare organization deals with a great deal of sensitive and federally regulated patient information. The consequences of losing control of security over any part of the network are high. Your Wi-Fi network is a critical component to providing the medical and health services you need to satisfy customer and employee needs. HIPAA compliance requirements must be maintained over this network. By using EnGenius Cloud, you can guarantee that your organization protects the information and maintains the compliance necessary to run your business.
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