Customers can now secure their Epic applications with F5’s industry-leading security solutions and features
WorldTech IT’s Epic Application Delivery Service is the perfect F5 professional services solution to secure critical Epic healthcare information and reduce impacts to patient care caused by cybersecurity vulnerabilities and breaches. Our Epic Application Delivery Service offers comprehensive & sophisticated world-class support and F5® professional services for securing your Epic applications with F5® BIG-IP® Advanced WAF. Epic customers can also benefit from our F5 Always-On Program, offering ongoing professional services, maintenance, monitoring, emergency response, and 24 x 7 x 365 access to our team of F5-certified engineers.
Securing Epic Healthcare Data
In the last three years, healthcare data breaches have doubled, with over 51 million records exposed in 2022. The average cost of each breach exceeds $10 million in cleanup, fines, and legal expenses.
Security incidents not only impact patient care by causing delays, cancellations, and ambulance diversions but also affect data breach remediation processes, negatively impacting patient outcomes.
Moreover, understaffed IT and security teams can result in unaddressed vulnerabilities and slow response to security incidents. Additionally, the complex configurations required for Epic’s applications, whether hosted on-premises, in public clouds, or via Epic SaaS, can lead to misconfigurations affecting application security and reliability.
KEY BENEFITS
- Improve security posture: Protect your Epic applications from threats with consistent policies and advanced defenses.
- Increase uptime and reliability: Additional redundancy helps to minimize outages to keep patient care on schedule and improve outcomes
- Satisfy regulatory compliance: Demonstrate compliance with security and privacy regulations from governments and industry regulators from PCI compliance to Hippa.
- Boost performance: Real-time traffic optimization and visibility deliver faster applications and a better user experience.
- Enhance efficiency: Reduce the strain on IT resources with templatized deployments, unified management, and automation.
Protect Data and Operations with F5
Keep your Epic applications fast and available with F5® BIG-IP®, no matter where they are deployed
EPIC + F5 SOLUTION MODULES
Improve EMR Security
Protect healthcare data and Epic applications
Defend your Epic applications against security threats like DDoS stacks, bad bots, OWASP Top 10, API attacks, data leakage, and credential stuffing.
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall (AWAF)
❭❭ F5 BIG-IP AWAF F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF makes protection easier. Secure patient access to applications, prevent DDoS attacks, and mitigate other cybersecurity risks.
Reduce Complexity and Misconfigurations
Scale your Epic deployments safely
Leverage secure and efficient Epic application delivery at scale, all backed by our team of application delivery experts providing world-class support and professional services.
F5 Professional Services
❭❭ F5 Professional Services Deploy fast and secure Epic applications behind world-class support and professional services by our application delivery experts.
Improve Scalability and Availability
Scale and optimize Epic applications
High performance and availability are vital to avoid slowdowns and outages that result in patient compromises.
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager
❭❭ F5 BIG-IP LTM Manage network traffic so your Epic applications are always reliable, secure, and optimized for traffic management.
F5 BIG-IP (DNS) Global Server Load Balancing
❭❭ F5 BIG-IP DNS Hyperscale and Protect DNS while optimizing global app delivery with BIG-IP DNS for your EPIC apps.
Secure Epic Application Data and Access
F5® BIG-IP® Advanced WAF protects Epic applications from security threats that can lead to a breach of protected health information (PHI) or service outage. Looking for added Epic security for electronic health records (EHR) or electronic medical records (EMR)? Pre-built, validated policies for Epic can be customized to meet each organization’s needs. Administrators can take advantage of best practices and rapidly deploy new applications with less effort.
Centralized management makes it easier to maintain consistent policies across the entire environment, creating a better security posture. Machine learning, behavioral analytics, and security intelligence identify and block sophisticated threats while allowing access to legitimate users. Advanced WAF protects against:
- The OWASP Top 10
- Bad bots that scrape data, create fake accounts, and abuse claims payment integrity
- DDoS attacks that can slow down apps or take them offline
- Credential stuffing attacks that can lead to data breach, account takeover, and fraud
- API attacks on your third-party integrations with Epic integrations
Figure 1: F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF makes protection easier ©2024 F5, Inc. All rights reserved. F5, and the F5 logo are trademarks of F5, Inc. in the U.S. and in certain other countries. Other F5 trademarks are identified at f5.com.
KEY FEATURES
- Behavioral DDoS protection: Identify layer 7 attacks in real time to block malicious traffic.
- Compliance dashboard: See the level of mitigation against the OWASP Top 10 to better understand and report Epic security posture.
- Traffic management: Direct traffic to the best available server to increase performance.
- Automatic failover: Shift to a backup data center for an entire site or only affected apps.
- Granular customization: Create Epic customizable security policies or traffic management rules to meet specific needs.
Increase Availability and Scalability
When Epic applications run slowly or are unavailable, they create extra work and frustration for medical staff and patients. Delays in accessing records or relying on paper backups can impact quality of care.
F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and BIG-IP DNS can scale and optimize network traffic so Epic applications remain fast and accessible. Monitor service health to steer traffic to the best available server or automatically failover to a backup data center. Use network isolation to separate application web front ends from back-end databases for greater protection.
BIG-IP can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud with hardware and virtual editions. It can scale applications on demand to improve load times and user experience. Built-in DNS security blocks malicious communications that could slow performance or increase infrastructure costs, and TLS/SSL offloading helps increase server performance by having BIG-IP manage encryption and decryption.
Figure 2: Increase availability and performance with BIG-IP local and global traffic management.
Related Services
The Importance of Preparing Your Infrastructure for Epic Hyperdrive with F5 BIG-IP Solutions
1. Hyperspace to Hyperdrive Epic Migrations Services Using F5
As Epic transitions to its new Epic Hyperdrive platform, healthcare organizations are faced with a crucial inflection point—ensuring their infrastructure can keep up with the increased resource demands. Epic Hyperdrive, with its enhanced features and higher traffic loads, requires a significant boost in CPU capacity to maintain optimal performance. In fact, Epic recommends upgrading platforms like F5’s BIG-IP when CPU utilization reaches 50% or more in production environments. This importance of proactively planning to increase your capacity becomes essential to avoid costly application disruptions, including:
- Performance Bottlenecks:
- Frequent slowdowns during peak hours, affecting patient care.
- Inconsistent application responsiveness impacting healthcare
providers’ efficiency.
- Security Vulnerabilities:
- Increased exposure to DDoS attacks and other threats.
- Limited advanced security features to protect sensitive patient
data.
- Management Complexity:
- Difficult and time-consuming configuration and management.
- Inefficient monitoring tools leading to delayed issue resolution.
Epic Hyperspace to Hyperdrive Migrations: WorldTech IT Optimizes BIG-IP Infrastructure for Healthcare’s Transition to Hyperdrive
WorldTech IT can help healthcare organizations navigate Epic Hyperdrive Migrations by conducting a comprehensive assessment of their current BIG-IP infrastructure, ensuring it is fully equipped to handle the increased load that Hyperdrive brings. By aligning with Epic’s guidelines and working closely with their representatives, we provide tailored solutions that enhance your system’s performance, security, and scalability. Now is the time for Epic customers to ask about their Epic migrations plans to Hyperdrive and explore opportunities to upgrade their infrastructure. Whether you’re looking to replace Citrix or are already using BIG-IP, our team is here to support your journey toward a seamless and successful Hyperdrive implementation.
BENEFITS OF EPIC MIGRATIONS:
- Improved Performance: Faster access to applications, reduced latency.
- Enhanced Security: Robust protection of sensitive health data.
- Scalability: Easier to scale with growing healthcare demands.
- User Experience: Streamlined, modern interface for healthcare providers.
Protect Epic Healthcare Data and Operations with WorldTech IT + F5
Our Epic Application Delivery Service offers expert support and F5 professional services for securing your Epic applications, made even better with our F5 Always-On Program. Secure your Epic applications today by contacting us for more information!
