Siemens Healthineers

Background

Siemens Healthineers is one of the world’s largest and most influential healthcare technology companies, employing more than 70,000 people globally and serving hospitals, clinics, and researchers across nearly every continent. At its German headquarters near Erlangen, the company’s medical device division develops complex imaging systems including MRI, CT, and ultrasound machines.

In 2024, a development team at Siemens Healthineers received a request to modernize legacy software used in several medical devices. This project required building a controlled hardware and networking environment where engineers could test new software, push updates, and securely manage sensitive device logs. Unlike traditional office IT deployments, these systems had no direct internet connectivity and strict compliance requirements around data traffic and isolation.

Within this context, software developer Ellen Dex, who had already gained private experience running UniFi equipment at home, proposed UniFi as the foundation for the prototyping environment.

Organization Requirements

For the prototyping network, Siemens Healthineers required a solution that would:

• Isolate medical devices in a secure testbed — ensuring no uncontrolled external connectivity.
• Enable straightforward traffic visibility and logging — allowing engineers to confirm when devices initiated updates or transfers.
• Scale for multiple device types and rollouts — supporting at least 60 connected devices in simultaneous test scenarios.
• Remain cost-effective and agile — avoiding the complexity and high licensing costs associated with traditional enterprise vendors such as Cisco.

Why UniFi

UniFi offered Siemens Healthineers a balance of scalability, simplicity, and cost-efficiency that matched the team’s prototyping requirements.

• Ease of Deployment: Unlike traditional enterprise hardware, UniFi equipment was plug-and-play, enabling a small development team without dedicated network administrators to get up and running quickly.
• Cost Advantage: Even high-performance UniFi Pro switches came in significantly below equivalent Cisco models, allowing for experimentation without straining prototype budgets.
• Visibility and Control: Features like the Topology view allowed Dex and colleagues to monitor 60+ devices in real time, observing precisely when connections initiated and data moved.
• Scalability for Expansion: While the current setup served a single prototyping site, UniFi’s modular architecture provided a clear path toward larger deployments, including international rollouts.

Deployment Experience

Core Infrastructure for Prototyping

The initial UniFi deployment at Siemens Healthineers’ prototyping lab consisted of:

• 2× Pro Max 48 (HG) Switches — high-performance 48-port models, supporting more than 60 medical devices with room for additional scaling.
• 1× UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra — providing secure external connectivity where required, though most devices remained LAN-isolated.
• 1× Aggregation Switch — linking the core switches efficiently.
• 3× UniFi U7 Pro Access Points — Wi-Fi 7 APs, deployed to allow engineers wireless laptop access while keeping devices hardwired.
• 1× UniFi NAS (with 10G support) — storing device logs and update packages securely within the isolated network.

Although modest in scale compared to enterprise-wide rollouts, the deployment provided a controlled, full-stack UniFi environment tailored to development needs.

Monitoring and Traffic Visibility

The most valued feature for Dex’s team was UniFi’s Topology view. With dozens of tightly controlled devices, engineers needed simple real-time insight into which endpoints were communicating.

This monitoring simplified an otherwise complex challenge: combing through logs across many medical endpoints. By surfacing live traffic at a glance, UniFi gave developers confidence that updates or transfers were proceeding as expected, and flagged anomalies for further investigation.

Reliability and Flexibility

Though the deployment was strictly a prototype, the reliability of UniFi hardware impressed the team. The NAS in particular stood out for offering 10G connectivity at an accessible price point.

The only improvement Dex noted was a desire for more native 10G slots for future scaling, underscoring that the platform was already being pushed in ways comparable to larger enterprise systems.

Additional Solutions and Expansion

Towards Enterprise-Grade Gateways

For the prototype, the team used a Cloud Gateway Ultra. However, Dex had already identified UniFi’s Enterprise Fortress Gateway (EFG) as the logical next step for production-scale rollouts.

This roadmap illustrates how UniFi provides both an accessible entry point and a clear upgrade path toward international, enterprise-class deployments.

Potential Expansion into Other UniFi Solutions

Currently, the deployment focuses on UniFi Network. While UniFi Talk was noted as interesting, Siemens Healthineers relies heavily on Microsoft Teams for communication, reducing demand for a standalone telephony solution. Protect and Access were not part of the prototype phase but remain possible future options as infrastructure expands.

Conclusion

For Siemens Healthineers, UniFi provided a fast, cost-effective, and reliable foundation to prototype networking for next-generation medical device software. The deployment empowered developers to securely manage more than 60 connected devices, track traffic patterns in real time, and prepare for broader enterprise-scale rollouts without the overhead of traditional networking vendors.

The experience highlighted UniFi’s strengths for healthcare and other industries where security, scalability, and operational clarity are critical. What began as a small, self-directed experiment in Erlangen has the potential to influence broader adoption across Siemens Healthineers’ global operations, proving UniFi’s adaptability from pilot projects to enterprise-scale deployments.