welcome everyone to thecube virtual i am your host rebecca knight today we are talking about cyber security and health care our guest is ken checker he is a problem solver at netscout thanks so much for coming on the show ken oh my pleasure thank you for having me i love your job title a problem solver tell our viewers a little bit about netscout and about your role there sure no i appreciate that uh yeah netscout's been around since 1984 uh and the the gentleman starter company two gentlemen starter company uh anil sengal is still our ceo he's very passionate about what we do believes in what we do and our focus really is is really service triage and making sure that important customer services and none more important than health care are are up and running and functional and so our focus is really they're really protecting we call ourselves guardians of the connected world uh we take that very seriously uh because when you think about the the technology uh the complexity and how we all really the reliance on everything that we do and how we uh rely on technology as a just a society um we really our focus is protecting that so the applications the services the network uh that's all part of the the service chain for that well we know that healthcare organizations and hospitals are under tremendous strain and pressure because of the covet-19 pandemic but also recently hospitals all over the country have been hit and targeted in a scourge of ransomware attacks can you tell our viewers a little bit about what you're seeing and what's what's happening right now oh yes it's uh it's really sad uh it's just an interesting uh it's an interesting time in the world obviously uh but we are seeing a very heavy increase in the number of attacks on from a cyber security perspective really an extortion and ransomware and there's a there's a slight difference between the two um but effectively what's happening the we'll call them the uh the bad guys are going after healthcare organizations that have some some vulnerabilities uh where you know they have some they have some areas where they can be attacked and effectively what happens is they will either launch a denial of service attack which is really a lot of robot type computers launching just directed attacks at these particular caregiving organizations these hospitals uh and then so they're trying to take down services um and that's one thing and so that's really more of a ransomware where they hey we showed you we can do it now we're going to extort money from you until you pay the other one is more of a ransomware where they've already penetrated the what we'll call defenses of the of the hospital and then now they're they're saying okay we've already we've already taken control of your system and they lock you out until you pay the ransom both we're seeing lots of attacks in that realm so what is the upshot in terms of patient care i mean this this sounds awful what are patients seeing what are doctors seeing well it's a really good point uh especially in today's world with the pandemic but really any time for health care we all have you know children aunts uncles moms dads nobody wants to be in the hospital for extended periods of time and when they're in the hospital we want to make sure that you know from a healthcare organization they want to make sure they give the best care possible and the caregiver so the nurse the doctor has the opportunity to do what they do and focus on what their their caregiving and not on the technology so when things like ransomware extortion or any particular uh impact on performance for a particular application it just impacts the caregiver which is you know and it affects us because these are people that you care about you don't want them in the hospital you don't want them in pain and the caregivers there you know these are passionate people that do what they do obviously they're dedicated to it so when there's an impact from a cyber security perspective or a application or network issue that affects health care that affects our loved ones and you just you know you really put yourself in that position we uh especially netscout we like to view we partner with our customers so and we don't take that lightly that's something that we mean and it's heartfelt and the reason for that is we look at ourselves as an extension of their team this is what healthcare organizations offer to their to their patients and they're there for for care to get well we want to make sure they have every opportunity to do that and because those healthcare organizations rely so much on technology networks applications and really protection from bad guys in cyber security uh we just want to make sure that those services are assured and that's why that's where our focus is so this i mean there are lives in the balance as you're describing this is a technical challenge but it's also one of resources a lot of these organizations just simply do not have the resources to deal with these problems effectively great point that's a great point i mean especially in today's world the the actual industry for healthcare has really taken a beating because it really had to focus their their whole uh all of their funds frankly and all of their uh the resources towards the pandemic which would be personal equipment mobile hospitals and that's that's taken a tremendous toll and they've also from just a revenue perspective they've really taken a beating frankly on on what happens from their revenue cycles because elective surgeries are way down so when you start looking at you take that into consideration so they've got very very tight resources and cyber security in general is a just a thankless job they're under attack every single day no matter what their industry is so when you look at the at the current situation to get tight resources cyber security is under a lot of stress and oh by the way here come the ransomware and extortion attacks it's just it's just a it's terrible what's going on but this is an area where where we feel this is a spot where we can really help number one our focus is really on network and service assurance so the applications in the network and that's what we're very good at and been doing it for many years but the the upside and the place where we really feel we can help uh is really twofold and that is that same solution the same deployment that we have for network and application really can be leveraged by cyber security folks as well mainly towards the areas of denial of service mainly towards areas of voice over ip we think of telecommunications and telemedicine that's all being leveraged and heavily leveraged right now specifically by healthcare organizations well again if i'm a bad guy and i know you're trying to use your telemedicine to take care of your patients and have that interaction with the doctor and the patient and i take those services down well now i've impacted patient care though that all runs over unified communications protocols voice and video things that we can monitor not only for performance but also when we see cyber type issues and that's a it's a really big uh i would call it a bit of a hole at the moment because that's a spot where cyber security teams are so strapped so resource strapped as well uh from from what they're trying to deal with every day that's a spot we can help with and help with immediately and as i mentioned the other part is really the denial of service pieces which is that's part of what we do as part of our our framework of what we deliver for services so you're describing an exceedingly complex caregiver chain on so many different levels in terms of cyber security in terms of telemedicine um and you also said that netscout really partners with its clients talk a little bit about netscout solution and how it helps clients and or healthcare organizations grapple with these challenges no that's a great question well the the one thing uh right off the bat is we look at network traffic and that means application traffic so while we plug in on the network and take traffic from taps and spans and whatnot we take traffic into our appliances so that we can then we crunch that the data through our smart data we call adaptive service intelligence that's our patent and we run it through that engine and that creates smart data and that smart data then can be leveraged for muji is my problem with my network is my problem with my application is it something like a service enabler like dns or dhcp or ldap which is really the basic uh basic building box for active directory for authentication uh so when you look at a complete as you mentioned a complex chain uh an electronic medical records application uh an emr that's really the that's really the go-to application for for a hospital uh because it's scheduling that's billing that's diagnosis that's that's history that's patient history it's just so it's so integral to what they do and when there's an impact with that that affects patient care and no one ever wants to hear oh my goodness we we log we had a bad outcome with the patient because of a complete a computer glitch you know network application what have you uh and so what we do is the ability to take all that data in crunch it through our engine and then and then display that in dashboards that are very easily consumable by not just network people but really application even management cyber security unified communications folks and and the focus here is we want to get the problem set we know they're going to be problems it happens every day and you know networks and applications are complex the idea is when we have an issue like that let's get the problem to the right team so that they can then go through their service restoration process and again the whole point here is keep services up and running but the the challenge becomes in a complex application team set up where you've got dns dhcp ldap radius so you've got service enablers then you've got web servers application server database servers load balancers firewalls when somebody says oh my goodness the emr is down or we're having issues with our network that's a very tough chain to try and pinpoint it's almost needle in a haystack so what we do and this is kind of our our bailiwick in the world is really we take all of that different traffic and we expose uh where where the hot spots where's the latency where are the error codes where do we see protocols that aren't behaving well where are we seeing things that are we're seeing authentication failures and the big win for the for the healthcare organization on that and that standpoint is i can see all of my traffic all of my applications and then i can pinpoint where i'm having issues so that i can restore services very quickly what are some of the best practices that have emerged in terms of the company in terms of the organizations and hospitals that are doing this well what would you say that they're doing right one thing they want a partner so they recognize the fact that number one you know they've got limited staff uh and they actually want to partner with netscout and what that means is we actually go in and we'll design solutions that will address their specific requirements that's that's very important what we do but when we do so we take uh you know we different product sets but our infinite stream our infinite stream next generation isng is our data collector and that's really the the workhorse of our solution it processes all the packets from you know we'll get technical here for a second one gig to 100 gig and that's a lot of data to to to process and because we can just get to the point with the process to the smart data engine and get to the problem show me where my latency is show where my problems are showing my protocols uh pulling that up through our packet flow which engine which kind of facilitates us collecting from multiple hops of the network uh a lot of times uh iit folks will ask us well we want hop to hop views of this i'm like great let's do that we can do it right now we just need to sit down design it but we really design towards their their use cases and in healthcare it's very common you can have dmz's you're going to have people accessing their electronic medical records through their dmz uh and things like that and as it goes through the back end services we basically take a traffic feed from all those different hops of the network or in cases there that make the most sense uh the primary spartan choke points and then take that data in and then we do what we do we expose the data and expose the performance information and most customers and it's like this in the world people usually don't call you up to say hey rebecca you're doing a great job today i want to buy you a cup of coffee especially in i.t they call up to say hey things aren't working hey fix it hey i can't do something and so our our job is to help facilitate with those customers and really partner with them to design solutions so that they can not only view that information uh but also triage it really quick and the word triage makes a great deal of uh sense in health care for example if you have a you know you hurt your finger they're not going to take an x-ray of your foot it makes no sense because they've already triaged that that's not your problem we do the same thing but we do it more from the network and application side to see where the hot spots are you are the it triage so talk a little bit about about this you are a problem solver and so right now we have a crisis on our hands of monumental proportions do you think that it has forced healthcare organizations and hospitals to innovate more quickly at this time or do you think that there is still just so much uncertainty taking place right now that it is hard to see the forest for the trees what what are you seeing that's a that's a really good question uh we're seeing both uh just to put it just very so one of the biggest changes that really the the pandemics had on everybody is the switch to everybody went from i have 10 maybe 20 of my workers working remotely over vpn contractors uh things like people are there just can't be in the office for a reason they switched from 10 to 20 to 70 80 90 percent so it was an overnight change so think of the impact on that the caregivers are at the hospital they're actually you know the frontline workers they're at the hospital you know serving their p their their patients but people in the administration accounting i.t other things that are important to the organization all had to switch to work from home obviously for safety reasons so the impact on just the internet link number one huge impact before it was used for outbound hey i'm gonna go check you know i'm gonna go do some research i'm gonna go check a website i'm gonna you know see what's what's uh what sports activities going on today now all the traffic is coming inbound on the internet and number so that's number one number two big change vpns vpns took an enormous beating that maybe they were size for for that type of scalability overnight and maybe they weren't so the organizations that were kind of prepped for it not such a big change and we've seen some good results from that but there are also organizations that immediately had to switch to oh my goodness i need to upgrade my vpns and my internet links because i wasn't prepared for this um so the the larger organizations sometimes have a little more uh capabilities to make that change quick the smaller organizations that's a tough call so they really have had to innovate quite a quite a bit on that side of it but when you add the that stress on things that also puts shows that the internet and the vpn is really points where the bad guys are going to target which again we're seeing we're starting to see that in the ransomware and the extortion attacks so it has forced innovation certainly um but you bring it to the point of force through the trees uh there's still a lot of work to be done uh so that's that's where we're really uh putting a lot of our focus especially in health care right now because it's got the the biggest impact uh well frankly to society right now and the religious uh the companies so as company as healthcare organizations are navigating this period of new normal and of course we've had some positive vaccine news so we can say that that perhaps there is going to be an end to this pandemic uh in the coming year but how are they planning ahead i want you to close us out here with how healthcare organizations are thinking about the next 12 to 24 months and if you have any advice for them i'm sure they would be all ears uh yeah i think we could all use some good advice right now on that one short answer is you know i don't know either right now in healthcare it is a big challenge because of that as mentioned earlier the impact on on on the personal protection equipment mobile hospitals and and frankly where they've had in the revenue laws so it's become a you basically have to do more with less right now uh which is one of the things that we do uh and really it's kind of our message for customers anyway i'm a big proponent of use what we have what if you have our solution use what you have and use it to its fullest extent uh especially while times are lean you know we just don't the wallets aren't as big right now so we're gonna have to really focus yet i mean has there been a bigger time in healthcare ever than right now i can't think of one so our focus right now and our message to our customers and anyone else is if you've got our types of solution use it to its fullest capability so that you can triage and so that you can you know not have patient impacting issues and on top of all the other things you have to deal with you bring up the point about the vaccines one of the things that we've seen especially for what's called healthcare organizations that are more research focused is um the bad guys aren't very nice so the bad guys are going to go after organizations where they can have a big we'll call it splash or they can steal something so research hospitals that that are working on vaccines or something in that realm have been huge targets again ddos for ransomware and extortion my message for anyone in healthcare right now is you know bless you first of all and second of all use what you have to its fullest extent which means a solution like ours yes use it for network monitor use it for application monitoring but but please use it to protect yourself for cyber security type visibility uh we typically in a lot of cases uh we'll see uh traffic that that some cyber security tools don't and not because they're bad tools but because we're installed in places that they sometimes aren't so that might be uh where they're typically installed maybe on the perimeters of network and endpoints we actually are instrumented through that service chain so not only the outbound internet the wide area network links the vpns and dmzs and and vdi and all those acronyms that i'm throwing out those are typical spots for us as well as though virtualization so that can be cloud or private cloud so effectively we have areas of visibility that can be leveraged in big bigger and better ways even really on the cyber security and unified communication sides of the fence so my message would be to be just use the what you have to its fullest capability uh especially when times are lean and uh keep up the good fight excellent leverage what you got ken checkout problem solver at netscout thank you so much for coming on thecube thank you for having me been a pleasure i'm rebecca knight stay tuned for more of the cube virtual you