Security Upgrade

Background

Somerset NHS Partnership is a Trust that has 60 sites spread around the South West and employs more than 4,000 staff. The Trust provides services from 13 community hospitals across the county.

As a large trust IT infrastructure and security is very important, particularly in light of the recommendations and reports made by Caldicott and Martha Lane Fox.

The Trust’s previous IT infrastructure consisted of a bank of aging Juniper Firewalls that the trust managed, but were nearing the end of life.

As part of an upgrade programme, the trust created a list of preferred Security Vendors to investigate how the trust could benefit from Next Generation Firewalls. One of the firewall vendors shortlisted was Fortinet who reached out to their Platinum Partner Nouveau Solutions to assist in the presentation of the security solution to the Trust.

Requirements

As a result of the programme, Nouveau Solutions identified that there was a requirement for rich security features across the trust such as web filtering, intrusion detection, anti-spam, sandboxing and load balancing all managed centrally – something that was very high on the requirement list.

What we implemented

Nouveau recommended to the trust the Fortinet Eco Security System which allowed the trust to explore different security options as the trust evolves, specifically focusing on protecting endpoints and databases in a joined-up manner.

The information technology team researched compliance and came to the conclusion that the Fortinet offering was the right solution, being impressed with the cutting edge technology and position in the Magic Gartner Quadrant.

Results

The completion of the project was in January 2016 and is working fantastically. The biggest advantage is the single management interface that allows all aspects to be managed effectively from one single part.