StoneGate Platform to Replace and Strengthen the Firewall Security
North Cheshire Hospitals Trust adds true resilience to a security infrastructure covering multiple acute hospital sites by adding Stonesoft’s clustered firewall and end-to-end centralised management system
The North Cheshire Hospitals Trust, an NHS Trust providing high quality health care services
to the people of Halton, Warrington and neighbouring communities, improved the resilience and
manageability of its IT firewall infrastructure by deploying Stonesoft’s StoneGate Platform.
The Trust is located within the Cheshire and Merseyside Strategic Health Authority, and covers
an area of approximately 100 square miles, providing accessible, patient focused health care to a
population of nearly 310,000 individuals.
Crucially, patients, staff and IT systems are spread across two major geographically disparate
sites. Halton Hospital and Warrington Hospitals are situated approximately 11 miles apart within
North Cheshire in the North West of England, between the cities of Manchester and Liverpool.
The North Cheshire Hospitals Trust is committed to an ongoing program of modernization of both medical and support services, including IT infrastructure, consolidating and integrating services across the two hospital sites.
Following a tendering exercise, the NHS Trust decided Nviron, an established technology reseller
and specialist security systems integrator, would take responsibility for the project, including
supply and implementation of the chosen technology.
When it embarked on the project to deploy improved firewall precautions, the North Cheshire Hospitals Trust decided immediately that it needed a solution with a very high level of built-in resiliency, and put this requirement at the top of its list of priorities for any replacement system. Other items on a lengthy and stringent list of requirements for the replacement system included active clustering across the two hospital sites, ISP Multi-homing, centralized cluster management, and all-important EAL4 certification.
Steve Nicholson, IT services manager for North Cheshire
Hospitals NHS Trust, said:
“When we looked for true clustering and resilience for access to off-site national hospital systems, StoneGate was the only solution we found that would meet every one of our requirements.”< /p>
The StoneGate High Availability Firewall boasts a number of key benefits that each contributed
to meet the security demands of the NHS Trust. These include:
- increased reliability with built-in Multi-homing
- a clustered, load-balancing solution
- simplified configuration and recovery resulting in fewer errors and reduced time
- updates of the global system in one safe and simple step from a remote workstation
- simplified rule bases meaning better policy enforcement, faster performance and fewer administrator tasks
- the ability to restore an entire system in minutes rather than hours.
"When we looked for true clustering and resilience for access to off-site national hospital systems, StoneGate was the only solution we found that would meet every one of our requirements."
Steve Nicholson, IT services manager for North Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust
The NHS trust worked with established technology reseller and specialist security systems
integrator Nviron on the project to choose and implement the new system. Stonesoft’s StoneGate
Platform has been Nviron’s strategic firewall solution of choice for a number of years, and in its
expert opinion was the only product that could meet the complex multi-site requirements of the
North Cheshire Hospitals Trust.
StoneGate’s ability to load-balance over two geographic sites was extremely attractive to Nviron, which was able to demonstrate and implement true resilience for NHS.net links via lines from both BT and Cable &Wireless.
Health care organizations operate from specialist sites with unique security requirements. Often a trust especially will need to collect, archive, combine, and share data across different parts of the organization confidentially and efficiently to provide the best possible care for patients, and the best possible resources for staff. At the same time, these sites need to ensure compliance with government policies and regulations, often on tight budgets
NHS Trusts must consider both data security and data availability. They need to ensure for example, that patient information is instantly available when needed, but conversely, managing patients’ privacy and data is also of paramount concern. Both these provisions must be met securely and efficiently to provide the best possible care and privacy for patients, while ensuring a high-level of authorized information access for staff.
Stonesoft is experienced in providing for the security and continuity needs of health care organizations. It can provide the products, services and support required to ensure: secures transmission and handling of health care data; reduced reporting burden with automated, scheduled, and detailed reports; significantly reduced security administration costs with intelligent centralized management; low administration costs; reduced risk of non-compliance with regulations; and improved productivity due to increased medical staff satisfaction and utilization of IT systems.
Other key benefits for systems integration from Nviron’s point of view included StoneGate’s core central management platform, and its ability to safe remote upgrade from that single management system. Nviron believes that this is a key consideration when deploying a firewall infrastructure across geographically disparate sites.
The main aim of the project was a simple one, to make the firewall infrastructure at NCHT as
resilient as possible, but additional stipulations over resilience and management meant that only
Stonesoft’s StoneGate Platform was up to the job.
The trust was convinced that StoneGate was the only solution with resilience at the core of its functionality, unlike competing products that it felt started with a firewall and then worked on adding resilience to the basic product. Likewise, the Trust believed StoneGate was the only solution that managed the whole cluster rather than the distinct firewalls, which it was concerned, would leave the sites vulnerable to small differences in the configuration of each device causing major problems in the clusters’ functionality. StoneGate’s central management platform avoids this problem, removing the need for very time-consuming and fiddly programming tasks.
“We had anticipated the transition from two very busy, individual firewalls from two separate vendors to one consolidated system to be problematic, however, the actual implementation and configuration was relatively smooth,”
Steve Nicholson, IT services manager for North Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust
Steve Nicholson added: “We had anticipated the transition from two very busy, individual firewalls from two separate vendors to one consolidated system to be problematic, however, the actual implementation and configuration was relatively smooth. This was not only due to the StoneGate product design and Stonesoft’s certified training and skills transfer, but also the invaluable assistance of Nviron’s team which ensured that there was not only comprehensive planning before implementation but appropriate post-implementation support.”
The Stonesoft StoneGate Platform is now fully operational across Halton and Warrington Hospital sites at the North Cheshire Hospitals Trust.
About North Cheshire Hospitals Trust
Founded in 2001, North Cheshire Hospitals Trust aims at providing high quality health care to
the people of Halton, Warrington and surrounding areas. It aims also at sustaining, developing and
increasing the range of health services provided locally.
The Trust is located within the area covered by Cheshire and Merseyside Strategic Health Authority. In 2004, the Trust was awarded two stars which is a reflection of the dedication and hard work of its staff. Every healthcare organisation in England that treats NHS patients must assess itself against a set of 24 ‘core’ standards and report the results back to the Healthcare Commission. The final declaration must be shared with relevant stakeholders, including voluntary and community groups.