Elevating Patient Care: Hackensach Meridian Health modernizes its network infrastructure

Executive summary: Nationally recognized for clinical excellence by U.S. News & World Report for 2026-2027, Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH) is New Jersey's top-ranked cancer program, its #1 hospital, and a premier healthcare provider in the New York-New Jersey metro area. Randy Brokaw, Cloud Engineer at HMH, discussed their strategic migration journey from on-premises systems to a simplified network infrastructure with Google Cloud Challenge: With multiple landing zones connected via VPC peering, HMH needed transitive routing to ensure 'always-on connectivity' for their managed services across these isolated environments. Solution: By partnering with Google Cloud, HMH adopted a hub-and-spoke architecture enabled by Network Connectivity Center (NCC). This unified model seamlessly routes on-premises traffic through a single Dedicated Interconnect while attaching their VPCs as spokes—delivering centralized, transitive connectivity that eliminates complex workarounds. To elevate security without imposing architectural constraints, the team leveraged Cloud NGFW's in-band network security integration. This architecture intelligently routes traffic to Palo Alto Networks appliances only when deep inspection is required, allowing low-risk traffic to flow natively. Prior to migration, the team leveraged VPC Flow Logs across their VLAN attachments and Network Intelligence Center’s Connectivity Tests to map traffic and identify critical paths. By visualizing these interactions with Sankey diagrams and validating configurations before the change, they achieved a seamless cutover with zero unplanned downtime or clinical disruptions. Result: This modernization enabled the team to consolidate multiple landing zones into a single, unified environment, successfully decommissioning over 30 redundant network resources—including legacy VPN tunnels and Cloud Routers. With network complexity resolved, the team can now leverage Gemini to build NetOps agents for automated troubleshooting, configuration checks, and anomaly detection—using the agents to drive proactive recommendations.

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