If you’re a healthcare IT leader in 2026, your to-do list is longer than ever. AI-powered diagnostics, real-time remote monitoring, telehealth at scale, FHIR compliance mandates, medical IoT proliferation—the clinical demands being placed on your infrastructure have never been greater. The gap between what the network is being asked to do and what it was built to handle is widening every day.
So the question isn’t whether you need a network modernization roadmap. The question is: do you have the right visibility, the right strategy, and the right partner to execute it?
The Network Is Now a Clinical Asset
Hospitals and health systems have always understood that technology enables care delivery. But in 2026, the network has evolved from a support function into a direct clinical asset—one whose performance, reliability, and security have a measurable impact on patient outcomes.
High-resolution imaging systems, robotic surgical platforms, AI-driven diagnostics, and real-time telemonitoring platforms are all generating enormous volumes of network traffic. Hospital wireless networks originally designed for far lighter workloads are now expected to carry the weight of an entirely transformed care delivery model. Latency is no longer an IT inconvenience—in a clinical environment, it is a patient safety concern.
At the same time, the attack surface has expanded dramatically. Ransomware attacks on healthcare systems increased by 45% in 2025, and healthcare remains the most targeted industry for cybercriminals. Every connected medical device, every remote access point, every cloud application is a potential entry vector. The network modernization conversation and the security conversation are no longer separate—they are the same conversation.
Why Most Roadmaps Stall Before They Start
The roadmap challenge for most healthcare IT leaders isn’t a lack of ambition—it’s a lack of visibility and data. It’s difficult to plan a modernization strategy when you don’t have a complete, current picture of what you actually have in your environment.
How old is that switching infrastructure in the east wing? Which devices are approaching last day of support and will soon be unpatched? Which software licenses are being underutilized? Where are there architectural gaps between your networking, security, and collaboration layers that leave you exposed or overpaying?
These are not rhetorical questions. For most healthcare IT teams, they are genuinely hard to answer—because the data lives across disparate systems, siloed contracts, and vendor portals that don’t talk to each other. This is exactly where ConnecTrack, Connection’s proprietary install base intelligence platform, changes the equation.
ConnecTrack: Visibility as the Foundation of Your Roadmap
A network modernization roadmap is only as good as the data it’s built on. ConnecTrack gives healthcare IT leaders and their Connection partners a comprehensive, real-time dashboard view of the organization’s entire Cisco install base—hardware, software licenses, enterprise agreements, support contracts, and lifecycle status across every site, from a single pane of glass.
When a healthcare organization provides a digital consent form, Connection gains the ability to pull the complete Cisco footprint—domestic or global—and surface every hardware asset, all lifecycle milestones, license activation and utilization rates, architectural gaps, and consolidation opportunities across licensing and enterprise agreements.
This visibility transforms the roadmap conversation. Instead of building a modernization strategy on assumptions, Connection and the healthcare IT team build it on facts—a precise, current map of the environment that makes prioritization, budgeting, and phasing decisions defensible and strategic. For a healthcare CIO presenting a multi-year technology roadmap to the CFO or board, that level of data-backed clarity is invaluable.
Security and Observability Are Not Optional Layers—They Are the Architecture
A network modernization roadmap that treats security as an add-on is not a modernization strategy—it is a liability. In healthcare, where a single ransomware incident can shut down clinical operations across an entire health system, security must be designed into the architecture from the ground up.
Cisco’s security portfolio—and Connection’s managed services built around it—provides healthcare organizations with the layered, integrated protection that the modern clinical environment demands.
Cisco Secure Access: Zero Trust for a Distributed Care Environment
The traditional network perimeter no longer exists in healthcare. Clinicians access EHRs from home, patient monitors connect over wireless, and cloud applications sit outside the data center. Cisco Secure Access is a cloud-delivered Security Service Edge (SSE) solution that secures access to every application, from every device, from anywhere—built on a Zero Trust framework that verifies identity and device health before granting access to any resource.
For healthcare, this means clinicians get frictionless, secure access to the applications they need, medical IoT devices are segmented and governed by granular access policies, and remote workforces are protected with the same rigor as on-site staff—with no gap in PHI protection regardless of where care is being delivered.
Cisco Splunk: Observability Across Every Layer
You cannot secure what you cannot see. Cisco Splunk provides healthcare IT teams with full-stack observability—correlating data across network, endpoints, cloud applications, and security events into a unified intelligence platform. For healthcare environments where uptime is directly tied to patient safety, Splunk enables IT teams to detect anomalies, troubleshoot performance issues, and respond to potential incidents before they escalate into clinical disruptions.
Managed XDR: Enterprise-grade Threat Defense Without the Enterprise Headcount
Cisco XDR, managed by Connection as a fully delivered Managed XDR service, gives healthcare organizations access to AI-driven threat detection, automated response, and expert-led security operations—without requiring an in-house security team to manage it. For critical access hospitals and rural health systems with limited IT staff, Managed XDR is the difference between being reactive to threats and proactively defending against them.
Cisco Meraki: The Network Infrastructure Built for Healthcare
Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed architecture delivers centralized visibility and control across every access point, switch, and security appliance from a single dashboard. For healthcare IT teams managing infrastructure across a main campus, satellite clinics, and remote care sites, Meraki delivers simplified management, medical IoT segmentation, high-availability connectivity, and reliable bandwidth for telehealth and remote monitoring—all with the simplicity that resource-constrained healthcare IT teams require.
Connection is a Cisco-powered managed services provider for Meraki, meaning we don’t just deploy Meraki—we manage it. Healthcare organizations gain the performance of a fully operational, monitored, and maintained Meraki environment without the internal overhead of managing it themselves.
🏥 Hear This Conversation Live at Cisco Live 2026
The themes in this blog post—securing healthcare infrastructure, modernizing the network, and building an architecture that can keep pace with clinical innovation—are exactly what Connection is bringing to the stage at Cisco Live 2026.
Join us for our Content Corner session, “Secure Infrastructure in Healthcare.”
📅 Tuesday, June 2, 2026 | 4:00 p.m.
📍 Village Theater II | Cisco Live, Las Vegas
🎤 Jennifer Johnson, Director of Healthcare Strategy and Business Development, Connection
🎤 Kimberlee Coombes, Senior Security Solution Architect, Connection
Jennifer and Kimberlee will be speaking directly to the challenges healthcare IT leaders face today—from securing distributed care environments and managing medical IoT risk, to building the infrastructure foundation that supports both clinical excellence and long-term operational resilience.
Whether you’re actively planning a network refresh, navigating a security transformation, or simply trying to understand where to start, this is the conversation you won’t want to miss.
We’d love to see you there! Stop by booth #2305 after the presentation, ask your questions, and let’s talk through what secure infrastructure in healthcare looks like for your organization.
Connection: A Gold Partner Built for Healthcare Outcomes
Connection’s position as a Cisco Gold Powered Service Partner with Cisco managed services designations for Meraki, Managed Firewall, and Managed XDR represents a depth of capability that translates directly into better outcomes for healthcare customers. When Connection engages the Cisco field team on behalf of a healthcare customer, the conversation is built on intelligence: here is what we know about this organization’s environment, here is the strategy we have built, and here is how we want to co-deliver it together.
For healthcare IT leaders, that model means receiving an aligned perspective from both a trusted IT partner with 40+ years of experience and the manufacturer—with a shared understanding of where the environment is, where it needs to go, and how to get there.
Building Your Roadmap: Where to Start
- Get complete visibility first—Use ConnecTrack to establish a baseline of your entire Cisco install base, including lifecycle status, license utilization, and architectural gaps.
- Address lifecycle risk immediately—Prioritize refresh for assets approaching last day of support, especially those in security-critical or patient-facing infrastructure.
- Modernize the network foundation—Migrate to Cisco Meraki cloud-managed architecture across all sites.
- Layer in Zero Trust security—Deploy Cisco Secure Access, Duo MFA, and network segmentation as the governing security architecture.
- Activate observability and XDR—Bring Cisco Splunk and Managed XDR online for proactive defense and full-stack visibility.
- Optimize licensing—Use ConnecTrack’s utilization data to consolidate into Cisco Enterprise Agreements and reduce cost and administrative complexity.
Rural and urban communities alike deserve care supported by secure, resilient, modern technology. With the right visibility, the right architecture, and the right partner, that standard is achievable—today.
Ready to see what’s really in your network environment? Connect with your Connection representative to start with a ConnecTrack assessment today—and come see us at Cisco Live 2026! Be sure to schedule a meeting with the Connection team during the event to get all your questions answered.
Samotria Holmes
Samotria Holmes is a Channel and Alliances Leader with more than 17 years of experience building and scaling partner ecosystems across Point of Sale, Cybersecurity, Cloud, CX, and AI technologies. She specializes in developing profitable practices and alliance strategies that align vendor priorities with real customer outcomes—translating complex programs, certifications, and go-to-market motions into clear, repeatable playbooks that drive pipeline, margin, and measurable value. Throughout her career, Samotria has grown partner communities, designed, and operationalized partner programs, and led cross-functional teams spanning Sales, Marketing, Product, and Services. Her work with Cisco and other global technology providers has helped organizations navigate strategic certification requirements and successfully transition to service-led, recurring revenue models. Beyond the technology world, Samotria brings a distinctly entrepreneurial perspective—as the founder of an award-winning specialty food brand, she developed a deep passion for brand-building, operations, and end-to-end customer experience that informs how she approaches partnerships today.
