Hospital Network Protects Patient Portals and EHR Access Against Targeted DDoS Campaigns

The Challenge

A regional hospital network operating multiple facilities faces repeated DDoS pressure targeting patient portals and systems used for EHR access. Healthcare availability requirements mean downtime can affect patient care and create regulatory risk. Legacy perimeter defenses struggle to distinguish legitimate telehealth surges from attack traffic, increasing the chance of service disruption or over-blocking.

The Approach

• Assessed the network and application architecture across facilities to identify single points of failure
• Mapped patient-facing services and classified them by criticality and availability objectives
• Designed segmented protections separating public-facing portals from internal clinical systems and data stores
• Developed incident response runbooks for DDoS scenarios aligned to healthcare compliance and audit needs

Implementation (example reference architecture)

• Deployed Microsoft Azure edge and failover controls (e.g., Azure Front Door with health probes across regional endpoints)
• Enabled Azure DDoS Protection Standard for public-facing networks
• Applied application-layer rate limiting tuned to telehealth traffic patterns and peak usage windows
• Implemented geo-based controls where appropriate (based on expected patient regions and risk thresholds)
• Set up automated alerting integrated with the SOC and compliance stakeholders

Outcomes (representative)

• Validated the ability to maintain portal availability objectives during sustained attack simulations without impacting clinical operations
• Confirmed failover behavior within the defined objective during regional outage simulation
• Reduced false-positive blocking of legitimate telehealth sessions through tuned policies and baselining
• Produced audit-ready documentation: control mappings, runbooks, and evidence from testing