Hutt Valley District Health Board

Industry: Healthcare

Location: New Zealand

Products Used: Web Security Gateway, V10000 appliance

Websense^® solution fills prescription for better security

Hutt Valley District Health Board is the publicly funded body charged with providing hospital and health care services to 140,000 people in Hutt Valley, a picturesque city located 15 minutes north of New Zealand’s capital. The board is responsible for managing a 260-bed hospital as well as coordinating a range of health-related community services.

The Problem

A medical environment uses numerous applications. They typically include a mix of clinical applications, patient management, and administrative systems. Almost every part of the hospital relies on the Information Systems (IS) infrastructure to receive, review, and record information every day.

Within the Hutt Valley District Health Board, there are approximately 1,400 personal computers located across the hospital and its six remote sites. All PCs require access to the Internet since the organisation’s intranet is hosted externally. Moreover, many of the PCs are considered critical to clinic functions and are permanently connected to the Internet via a generic account.

Information Systems operations manager, Kevin Trew, explains, “It’s important that any doctor in a clinical area be able to go to a machine and access records without having to wait the twenty or thirty seconds required to log on.” For a similar reason, little of the Internet content viewed on the PCs is cached. “It doesn’t give us much of an advantage, and it could create the problem of an old page being viewed in the clinical environment,” Trew says.

One downside of providing fast and easy access to the Internet for all users is that the PCs can be vulnerable to employee misuse and accidental visits to malicious websites. Trew adds, “Many of the PCs are in public places, and it’s important that staff are not seen to be visiting sites that are objectionable or which are unsuitable for the corporate working environment.”

Up until Trew’s arrival in mid-2009, the organization relied on an open source Internet filter to protect it from such problems; however, as a first line of defense, its use was limited. “The open source software wasn’t flexible enough for the organization, and it wasn’t being updated,” he says. “New malicious sites were being created, and they weren’t being blocked. As a result, there was no confidence within the organisation about our ability to protect or monitor the network.”

The Solution

Trew made it one of his first priorities to select a new, up-to-date replacement for the open source software. He researched 12 Internet security solutions before short-listing three that seemed to offer the highest levels of functionality. He then arranged for a two-week onsite evaluation for each of the short-listed options.

“In the end we chose Websense Web Security Gateway and a Websense V10000 appliance because they gave us all the features and functionality that other vendor solutions lacked. No other solution can inspect Web traffic as thoroughly and classify content in real time. It was also quick and effortless to implement and was by far the easiest solution to use,” says Trew.

Gen-i, the board’s preferred IT supplier, and Websense combined to manage the deployment, which involved configuring and installing the appliance and software and integrating the solution with Novell eDirectory to provide authentication services.

“Go live was very, very smooth,” Trew says. “Because we’d been through the learning curve during our two-week trial, we already knew what needed to change and what had to be customised for our environment.”

Now when employees use the Internet, they browse via the centralised Websense gateway, which automatically filters unsuitable and unsafe sites. And Web Security Gateway does so much more, says Trew. “It also classifies and scans content in real time, identifying risks that a generic URL filtering and antivirus solution would miss. Even the board’s remote sites are protected since they pass through the gateway before an external site can be reached.”

The Results

The new set-up has given Hutt Valley District Health Board the flexibility to tailor Internet access as they’d like and when required. For example, usage policies for social networking have been created and these sites have been opened up for departments and individuals that deal with youth issues on a regular basis.

Websense Web Security Gateway ensures that employees are not tempted by objectionable sites, while real-time updates keep the network protected from even the newest dynamic threats.

“Websense reporting capabilities were easier to set up and more flexible than any competitor we evaluated. If a manager is having problems with staff, we can simply run a report to see what they’ve been doing and whether there are in fact any issues,” Trew says. “The Websense solution is keeping our infrastructure safe and has given us everything we wanted. It has enhanced the reputation of IS within the hospital, and our customers can finally see that Information Systems is using modern, up-to-date technology to supply services for them.”

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