First - drop "air-gapped" term and replace it with "internet-gapped". TA^h^h^a^a! And it already have a name: "The LAN"... Now teach managers about importance of local net vs open/public/world net. Tell them cloud costs more becouse someone is making a fortune or three on it !

TIP: many buildings can be part of one LAN! It is called VPN and Russia and China do not like it becouse it is good for peoples!

TIP: data can be easily exchanged when needed! Including LAN.

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My wife is a hospital pharmacist. (1) When she gets a new prescription in, she needs to see the patients charts on the electronic medical records, and then if she approves the medication a drawer in the Pyxis cabinet (2) will open up when a nurse scans the patients barcode, allowing them to remove the medication, and then the nurse will scan the patient's barcode and the medication barcode in the patients room to record that it was delivered at a certain time. Computers are everywhere in healthcare, because they need records and computers are great at record-keeping. All of those need networks to connect them, mostly on wifi (so the nurses scanners can read things).

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It was description of very local workflow...

It was description of data flow - no any reason it should be monopolized by unsecure by design os vendor that need to be mandatory secured by essentialy kernel rootkit aka os hacking. Which contradicts using that os in the first place!

And looks like Crowdstrike is just if you ask for price then you can't have it version of SELinux :>>> RH++ for two decades of making presentations of SELinux necessity.

But over all allowing automatic updates from 3rd party not having clue about medicine to hospital system, etc. is managers criminal negligence. Simple as that. Curent state of the art ? More negligence! Add (business) academia & co to chronic offenders. Call them what they truly are - sociopaths via craft training facilities.

>In theory you could build an air-gapped network within a hospital, but then how
>do you transmit updates to the EMR's across different campuses of your hospital?

How do you transmit to other campuses of other hospitals ? EASY! Transfer mandatory data.
Pleas notice I used words like "mandatory" and "data". I DID NOT SAY "use mandatory http stack to transfer data"! NO. NO, I'm far, faaar from even sugesting THAT ! :>

>How do you issue electronic prescriptions for patients to pick up at their home pharmacy?

Hard sold on that "air-gapped and in cage" meme, eh? Send them required data via secure and private method! Communications channels already "hacked" - monopolized - by FB? Obviously that should do not happend in first place. So resolve it as part of un-win-dosing critical civilian infra.

>How do you handle off-site data backup?

That one I do not get. You saying that cloud access is a only possibility to have backups??? And Internet is a must to do it?? Is medical staff brain dead? Ah, no... It's just managers... Again.

>Quite honestly, outside of defense applications I'm not aware of people building large air-gapped networks

And dhcp and "super glue" and tons of other things was invented by military, for a reason, but that things proliferated to civilians anyway. For good reasons. Air-gapping should be much more common when wifi signal allows tracking how you move in your own home. Not to mention GSM+ based "technologies"...

There is old saying: Computers maximize doing. And when somewhere is chaos then computers simply do their work.