For any healthcare organization, and especially for larger institutions, rapid data access during a critical care event is a critical component of an intrusion detection and protection system. The IDS and IPS ability to offer a low latency and high capacity solution capable of ensuring that healthcare critical applications are not affected while security policies are being enforced is a must-have.

Fortinet designs and builds its own chipsets that offer a targeted level of performance as opposed to an IDS and IPS commodity chipset. By offloading computation onto its chipsets, designed for a specific exercise, its system can deliver lower latency and higher capacity, according to Ryan Witt, vice president of the Healthcare Industry Practice at Fortinet. Witt heads up a dedicated 10-person healthcare team to provide a greater granular understanding of key healthcare challenges.

Fortinet’s security appliance, FortiGate-60CX and a Cluster FortiGatge-200B also provides multi-threat protection across all sites in a network by integrating firewall, IPSec, and SSL VPN, antivirus, anti-spam, intrusion prevention and web filtering into a single device.

Integration is now a must have, says Witt, because the bad guys can fool a standalone device, hiding their attack by regularly updating their signature to avoid signature-based detection, says Witt.

Fortinet integrates and deploys port-hopping, application mimicking, such as botnets using Skype protocols and SSL encryption with real certificates. All of the vendors interviewed for this article point to the growing sophistication of cyber criminals as a driving force behind integrated security solutions rather than discrete IDS and IPS devices.

The Fortinet IDS and IPS component scan both perimeter and internal traffic to protect not only the data center but medical devices as well.

Pricing Model Priced in multiple modes: Pricing per appliance to provide the entire feature function under a single subscription, including the number of appliances.

Read our reviews of leading security specialists latest tools: 

⇒Cisco offers integration to prevent intrusion attacks from reaching medical devices, old and new

⇒IBM Security offers a threat protection solution using both hardware and software integration

⇒Juniper Networks uses static and dynamic inspection to manipulate files to detect malware

⇒Damballa Failsafe looks for patterns of suspicious activity with machine learning

⇒Symantec Endpoint Protection shields devices using reputation technology to identify threats

Helpful advice on planning your purchase of IDS and IPS tools:

• How to know if your intrusion detection and prevention solution meets HIPAA compliance rules
• 3 key factors to plan your budget for an intrusion protection system 
• What to watch: IDS and IPS features to consider when comparing different vendors products