The health system says the project helped contain ransomware exposure risks and cleared the way for remote robotic surgery technology deployment.
Elisity announced that St. Luke’s University Health Network deployed the company’s identity-based microsegmentation platform across more than 85,000 medical devices and other connected assets across its hospitals and outpatient sites.
According to the company, the deployment spanned 15 hospitals and more than 350 outpatient locations across Pennsylvania and New Jersey and was completed in 46 days without outages, IP address changes, or additional hardware installations.
Elisity said St. Luke’s adopted the platform after previous attempts to implement VLAN-based microsegmentation proved difficult to scale across the health system’s network environment. The company said its platform uses existing Cisco network infrastructure and does not require agents or network redesign.
The deployment included medical IoT devices, building management systems, printers, servers, and mobile devices, according to the company.
Elisity said the project reduced the potential ransomware “blast radius” from organization-wide exposure to containment at a single network switch. The company also said the segmentation effort enabled St. Luke’s to approve robotic surgical systems that previously raised cybersecurity concerns because of lateral movement risk on the network.
“Our mission was to make sure that if ransomware ever hit, it would be contained to a single device or switch, not take down the organization,” said David Finkelstein, CISO, St. Luke’s University Health Network, in a release.
The platform integrates with security and IT systems including Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Windows Defender, Entra ID, Active Directory, and ServiceNow, according to Elisity.
