Connectivity

The healthcare industry is rapidly expanding its deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. According to a new report from MarketsandMarkets, healthcare organizations are using the IoT to streamline clinical operations, manage workflows and enhance patient care. Major IoT applications in connected healthcare include remote patient monitoring, medication management and medical asset tracking.

In a previous post, we discussed the “last mile” connectivity problem — the limited performance associated with the shared Internet services available to remote offices and users. Most corporate data centers have a dedicated telecom circuit with guaranteed bandwidth and SLAs. However, it’s typically not cost-effective or even feasible to provision such circuits for remote locations.

Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) continues to see strong adoption in organizations of all sizes. In a recent Frost & Sullivan survey, 15 percent of respondents said their organization has already deployed SD-WAN, and 18 percent said that deployment was currently under way. A whopping 61 percent said they plan to deploy SD-WAN within the next 12 to 24 months. That leaves just 6 percent with no plans to implement the technology.

Getting data from a data center to a remote user involves a complex system of WAN connections. A well-managed data center will likely have a high-performance connection to an Internet service provider’s (ISP’s) backbone with guaranteed bandwidth and SLAs. The data travels over the Internet backbone at high speeds.