This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

Welcome to this week Health Community. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this Week Health, A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Today we have an interview in action from the 2023 fall conferences of CHIME in San Antonio and HLTH in Las Vegas, and we want to thank our show sponsors who are. In our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders and they are Olive, Rubrik, Trellix, Medigate, and F5. Check them out at this weekhealth.com and here we go.

Right here we are from the Health 2020 Conference in Las Vegas, and we are joined by Jay Mervis, senior director at Foritnet. And look forward to this conversation. It's great to great to meet you. Good to meet you in person. Be Yeah. It's gonna be fun. some people might not be familiar with Fornet, so give us, give us a little background on Fornet and what you guys do.

Sure. So Fornet is a 5 billion cybersecurity networking company. So we're the fortune 500 s and P 500. We also, we have 50 different products in our portfolio. We secure customers. I run our healthcare practice. We've grown. 50% last year, and we're up about 64% this year. So we're taking market share and helping customers secure their business.

What's the, you know, don't be offended that I asked that question cuz when we went into the AWS booth, I asked them the same question and people, you know, they look at me like people don't know what AWS is. I'm like, yeah, people don't know what AWS is. You always have to tell 'em what, what you do. So healthcare's. In the cybersecurity space. It, it's been a tough couple of years in healthcare. what kind of problem do you solve for healthcare systems?

So one is resource automation bill, so the resource constraints and automation within our platform, as well as the augment with our managed security partner. So with resource constraints with everybody to hire and work from home, a lot of our customers have had the need to augment their staff, whether it's a managed sim or so program, or just managed security from day to day.

So yeah, we're hearing that over and over again. We just had some CISOs together at an event where we asked, you know, what are the top five biggest challenges and resourcing.

Is one of the challenges that they name. Obviously there's other challenges. There's, there's still some resourcing from a people standpoint, but there's also still some budget challenges. I mean, when you look at all the things they have to protect, they have to almost choose which one they're, I mean, obviously you wanna do 'em all to a certain level.

But then you have to choose where you're gonna do your investments to be more protected. What kind of things are you seeing in the industry as you partner with organizations? You know, where are they focused right now and what kind of challenges are they trying to address?

Well, the four pillars we see Bill is one is the move to the cloud and the hybrid cloud within the environment. How do we secure that and get the same process controls in the cloud non-prem and have a uniform standardized output, remote patient monitoring, telehealth and telemed. The explosion of that, securing that and making those platforms run effectively to give better patient experience, connected medical, so all the devices that are, that provide actual care, protecting those devices and then mergers and acquisitions. And system expansion, enabling those services and rationalizing the tech. Those are the four pillars that we have. Huge engagement with customers.

So moving to the cloud, we'll move through this. Moving to the cloud services you offer primarily around consulting and helping them to define it or, and

securing it. So we secure all the public clouds as well as the private clouds the customers may build and they're on premise environment. The same controls,

same controls across the board. then we go into devices.

Devices. We talk connected medical all day. So

connected medical all day. It's interesting cuz one of the conversations we had with the CISOs was around connected medical devices in the hospital. They feel like they're getting more of a handle on. Sure. I remember back in the day I couldn't even give you an inventory and now they can give you an inventory. They can tell you where they're at, what the operating. They have micro segmentation around it and are doing all those things, which is fantastic.

But one of the challenges they threw out there is, okay, now we're, we're being asked to go into the home. how does coordinate look at that and how do you help them with that challenge?

So that's a two fronted thing. The connected medical, so the getting the handle on it. We work with multiple visibility.

So I'm sure you know who those guys are, the orders, the Mitigates Assemblies of the world, but we'll do the micro segmentation with our Fort Gate firewall, which will get customers to high trust, or we use Ford and Mac to enforce policy. The other thing is the virtual patching, but we've seen the customer going into the home with the scales and some of the wearables and those things, and we use our EDR product with those OEMs. So to be able to advance the tech map.

you've been at this conference, you've been talking to a lot of different people. What are you hearing is top of mind?

Top of mind is tech rationalization. How do we leverage what we've bought to deliver better care? And what's the ecosystem look like? How do we do things better to deliver a better patient experience?

Yeah. So this is financially a challenging time. Sure. And so it's how do we do more with less? How do we do more with this stuff than we've already we've already acquired. So give me an idea, you know, this conference is a little different than some of the other ones you probably go to. There's a lot of startups here. Do you work with a, a lot of these startups in, in terms of helping them to make sure they build a a solid, secure platform?

We've talked to quite a few of them. Bill. That's one of the things that we see out there where there are startups that are going to provide care. We've had multiple customers come by and say, we need you to talk to the CEO because we probably need to address this long term. So when we scale, we're secure. 📍

📍 All right. We'll get back to our show in just a minute. We have a webinar coming up on December 7th, and I'm looking forward to that webinar. It is on how to modernize the data platform within healthcare, the modern data platform within healthcare. And I'm really looking forward to the conversation. We just recorded five pre episodes for that. And so they're gonna air on Tuesday and Thursdays leading up to the episode. And we have great conversation about the different aspects, different use cases around the modern data platform and how agility becomes so key and data quality and all those things. So great conversation. Looking forward to that. Wednesday, December 7th at one o'clock. Love to have you join us. We're gonna have health system leaders from Memorial Care and others. CDW is going to have some of their experts on this show as well. So check that out. You can go to our website thisweekhealth.com, top right hand corner. You'll see the upcoming webinars. Love to have you be a part of it. If you have a question coming into it, one of the things we do is we collect the questions in the signup form because we want to make sure that we incorporate that into the discussion. So hope to see you there. Now, back to the show.

📍 📍 looking into next year, 2023 priorities we're looking at this challenging financial time, but we're also looking at a time. Health systems are looking to resource things, right?

So they're looking to continue to progress their security platform, continue to their security posture, reduce their attack factors and those kind of things. What kind of, what kind of advice, what kind of consulting are you giving them right now? Around how, how they're gonna do that with with limited resources.

Yeah. So Bill, that's a great question. A lot of the advice we give is what are you defining in your security program to go and deliver those results? So a lot of times in the past it was best of breed. How do we go and deliver a best of breed with everything that's out on Gartner's magic quadrants and a new shiny toy?

Now it's what do we have as a platform? And that's where Fornet is very, doing very well in the market. Customers are leaning in because of our fabric as well as our 500 plus partners in the ecosystem so that we understand that we would love to back a Ford, a truck. But from a customer perspective, how do we get in phases over the, the life of the

really fabric? How do we understand the fabric?

So the fabric is Ford, that's operating system, the 40 os, which is connects all of our products within the portfolio. So some of our competitors have done acquisitions to where those products. In integrated deeply within their, within their stack. So what we do is we do a much smaller integration and then we scale the product out so that it's, we can put it into the fabric and you'll have visibility to consolidate the threat intelligence within the platform.

So one example of that is our switching platform. So we, FortiGate is our market leading product. I've heard, I know you've talked to a lot of people about SD WAN and what they're doing to. Work from anywhere and consume from anywhere to for care delivery with our, when you add switching and wireless and that extends the security fabric, it gives you the consolidated thread intelligence across the entire network.

Are we bringing all that into, you know, so one of the challenges we always have is limited resources. Obviously we can outsource a, a knock and those kind of. But we have so many alerts coming in. Are we augmenting that with with some sort of algorithms, ai, machine learning and whatnot so that we can respond a lot quicker and not have to rely on its many people?

Yes. Yeah. So the machine learning ai, yes. So when we detect those anomalies first, that does cut down on the alert fatigue.

Fantastic. Hey, I wanna thank you for your time. Thank you, bill. Great to meet you in person. great to meet you as well.

Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it is Phenomen. That they have taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community, which is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors one more time, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. They are Olive, Rubrik, 📍 trx, Mitigate, and F5. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.