King Faisal Hospital

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King Faisal Hospital gains insight into patient internet access and protects key applications with NetFort LANGuardian.

Founded in 1970, King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre is the largest government hospital in Saudi Arabia. With over 850 beds and 8,500 employees, it has two branches in Riyadh and one in Jeddah, as well as an interconnected network of government hospitals. The hospital provides the highest level of specialized healthcare in an integrated educational and research setting. It aims to be a worldleading institution of excellence and innovation in healthcare. Its bimonthly general medical journal, the Annals of Saudi Medicine, is distributed worldwide.

Project planning

King Faisal Specialist Hospital provides its staff and patients with internet access, but insight into usage was limited to data provided by the ISP or the proxy server. Although this was not causing problems, the IT team was keen to understand internet usage in more detail so that they could identify current trends, anticipate future requirements, and troubleshoot problems such as slow links and inappropriate use of the network. In particular, the IT team wanted a detailed breakdown of usage by category and by location – for example, usage by staff, usage by patients, and usage by the Riyadh hospitals, the Jeddah hospital, and the Employee Social Club.

After watching NetFort’s demo and product videos on YouTube, the team selected the LANGuardian product to provide full insight into hospital internet usage. LANGuardian sits on the network and monitors traffic as it flows through the core switch rather than requiring installation on each user PC. This makes it extremely quick to deploy, although further modifications and adjustments (such as monitoring separate VLANs) can be done at leisure.

“We wanted to maintain our technical excellence at the hospital,” said Mshari Najeeb Al-abdulkarim, Computer Network Specialist at King Faisal Specialist Hospital. “It was clear that we needed high definition visibility into user and business internet access, and our current solution could not provide this. Consequently, we selected NetFort’s LANGuardian to help us know our network better.”

Results

King Faisal Specialist Hospital now has full visibility into the internet usage of its staff, patients, guests and other users. LANGuardian generates two reports each day, complemented by the daily report from the proxy server, helping the IT team to identify the sources of any bandwidth drains. Although it is too early to report on savings from the project, the team has been able to temporarily suspend users who were abusing their internet privileges and significantly exceeding acceptable usage limits.

Bandwidth management

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The hospital has not had any problems in the past, but the bandwidth management features of LANGuardian give the IT team complete reassurance that the hospital’s internet bandwidth is protected. The IT team can see at a glance how bandwidth is being used, apply usage quotas, and identify users who have exceeded or are about to exceed their quotas.

Now, patients and off-duty staff cannot affect the bandwidth reserved for business usage such as uploading radiology photos and x-ray photos to other hospitals. LANGuardian does not interfere with the flow of information across the network, so the hospital can monitor traffic without compromising network performance or reducing internet bandwidth for its users.

“We’re very pleased with LANGuardian and all of the aims of the project have been achieved,” concluded Mshari Najeeb Al-abdulkarim. “We now have complete visibility of our internet usage and can take appropriate action quickly should any issues arise. We can also ensure that business-critical applications are running smoothly, making sure that we maintain our track record of providing the very best service to our staff and patients.”

User activity monitoring

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As well as reporting on bandiwdth usage, LANGuardian gives the King Faisal Hospital IT team a one-page view of all network activity associated with each user on the network. Because LANGuardian integrates with the hospital’s Active Directory implementation, the reports contain actual user names.

Users interact with the hospital network in many different ways during the average day. They visit websites, open and close files on file shares, send and receive email, interact with lineof- business applications and databases, download files from the Internet, upload photos and videos to sites such as Flickr and YouTube, perform online backups, and more. They can also – usually unwittingly – expose the network and themselves to intrusions, malware, viruses, spambots, spybots, viruses, phishing attacks, and other security risks.

With LANGuardian, the IT team can see on a single dashboard a summary of all network activity associated with an individual user. From this starting point, they can drill down to more details on each type of activity. The user dashboard is an indispensable aid to network troubleshooting because most problems are reported by individual users, and the dashboard gives the network manager and helpdesk staff a summary of network activity from the point of view of the user who reported the problem.

Find out more

If you have any questions about how LANGuardian can help you with your network monitoring requirements, please contact us. If you would like to see LANGuardian in action, please try our online demo system or download a free 30-day trial to try it on your own network with your own data.