Case Study: Sharp HealthCare achieves centralized wireless management and 80% maintenance reduction with HPE Aruba Networking

Sharp HealthCare Switches to Aruba for Centralized Management and Protection of Open Wired Connections

Sharp HealthCare, a San Diego–based integrated health system serving over three million residents, faced a growing challenge: a distributed wireless LAN across seven hospitals and 40 clinics that was costly to operate, hard to troubleshoot, and needed multi-layered security to meet HIPAA requirements. Legacy “thick” APs and outdated authentication (WEP/LEAP) forced IT staff to travel to sites for fixes and left the organization “RF blind,” slowing support for mobile EMR carts, Wi‑Fi IV pumps and handheld devices used in critical care.

Sharp deployed Aruba controllers and dual‑band APs to centralize management, enable RF monitoring and enforce strong authentication and per‑user policies (including captive‑portal protection for open wired ports). The centralized, plug‑and‑play architecture gave IT visibility and remote troubleshooting from the data center, reduced maintenance time by about 80%, simplified scalability and improved security and compliance across the entire WLAN.

Sharp HealthCare

Gary Jenkins

Senior Network Engineer