HSCN Private Connectivity to Google Cloud Platform

UK’s Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) is a standards-based network that provides a reliable, efficient and flexible way for health and care organizations to access and exchange electronic information. For a Health Technology company that is NOT a health care provider, it’s mandatory to ONLY go through a recognized 3rd party service provider along with certain regulations that need to be adhered. For a Health Technology Company offering its services via the Public Cloud-like GCP, additional criteria had to be met so that HealthCare data security is of utmost priority.
The Challenge

  1. Losing Internet/SSH access to the instances in GCP because of the advertised default route 0.0.0.0/0 from the Service Provider through Cloud Interconnect/Router BGP session.
  2. In GCP, for a given Cloud Router, a maximum number of custom route advertisements per BGP session is 200, whereas HSCN has about 31K routes.
  3. Very limited access for validation testing on the HSCN Network side.

Customized Solution from Biarca
After careful study of the client’s Infrastructure requirements, the Biarca team architected an optimized solution involving the following components:

  1. Network Isolation

    2. Biarca created a new VPC network with a recommended compliance HSCN CIDR subnet for the private network. This VPC network is used to establish the Cloud Interconnect/Router BGP session for the private access between GCP and the service provider.

  2. Cloud Storage Static Content

    3. Biarca provided the best possible solution to serve the static content without making any changes to the existing setup. The solution uses existing GCP features to enhance security by using read-only access.

  3. HTTP(S) Load Balancer

    4. Google’s HTTP(S) load balancer feature used to address the backend services hosting secure static content along with the customer’s application.

    Biarca could provide an alternate solution too, in case, the customer does not want to opt for the Google LB feature.

Customer Value Proposition
The solution that Biarca designed for the setup of private access from HSCN Network to Google Cloud Platform had the following benefits:

  1. With the health monitoring application running on the Infrastructure solution designed by Biarca, there is
    significant cost savings in hospital admissions.
  2. For regulatory compliance, the solution provided network “isolation” and “independent management”
  3. Solution helped take advantage of the benefits that the Public Cloud can provide (e.g. cost savings, scalability, visibility & reliability)

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By Biarca