The Importance of your Firewall

Here at InTelemed we work with a lot of smaller hospitals and clinics, many of which have a small IT staff or no staff at all. They often depend on us to manage the entire hospital network and most importantly, their firewall. As most people know, network viruses, spam and hackers are constantly trying to attack computer networks as well as individual computers. What you may not be aware of is how often the attacks occur and how sophisticated they are becoming. Most small hospitals I work with get attacked on average 20 times per minute.



You read that right, 20 TIMES PER MINUTE. That is very normal. This equates to 1,200 times per hours or 28,800 times per day. We can track that in the firewall logs. Nearly all the attacks are automated from "botnets" or remote computers that have been compromised and are controlled by hackers. These botnets can span thousands or tens of thousands of computers. The attacks come in all flavors and evolve over time. This is why it is important to keep your firewall and antivirus software up to date and properly managed.

A lot of smaller hospital IT people don't feel comfortable managing their hospital's firewall, especially if they have been hacked in the past. Most firewalls must be set up for VPN's and some public server access, and one wrong setting in the firewall can open the door for a flood of attacks.

That is why we manage over 100 firewalls for small to mid-sized hospitals and clinics. We can remotely connect to them, manage the logs, keep the systems up to date, set up VPN's to vendors, and even help with setting up wireless networks for your hospital and patient staff. Our customers - especially IT people - sleep much better at night knowing they have an experienced network person managing such an important resource.