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Established in April 2007, Northern Trust is one of five health Trusts in Northern Ireland. It provides a broad range of health and social care services across ten localities, including two large acute-care hospitals and six non-acute hospitals. Northern Trust provides services for a population of approximately 460,000, the largest demographic area of any Trust in Northern Ireland, and has approximately 12,000 employees.

Northern Trust needed to gain visibility and control over the devices connecting to its network – including medical, clinical engineering and building management system (BMS) devices. Without this level of visibility, they faced significant risk in terms of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) network security and governance, as an ICT security incident potentially impacts the delivery of health and social care services to patients and clients. They looked for a solution that could secure its 15,000 endpoints across 150 sites that was not dependent on additional equipment or specific software version requirements, and selected ForeScout CounterACT.

Upon deploying CounterACT, Pat Black, ICT Network and Security manager at Northern Health and Social Care Trust, and his team were particularly impressed with the agentless aspect of CounterACT. The fact that CounterACT provides device visibility, security scan, and is capable of running a risk assessment of devices connected to the Trust’s network - without having to install anything on to the individual devices - was seen as a significant factor in the organisation’s decision to purchase ForeScout.

“We witnessed the power of CounterACT within a matter of hours of the appliance being installed. The network infrastructure environment that we work within has a significant number of connected devices that are neither Trust-owned nor managed. If a device presents a security or governance risk, a decision needs to be made quickly on how to effectively manage that risk, particularly if it is a compromised medical device,” said Black. “ForeScout enables us to reduce the risk associated with these non-Trust owned and unmanaged devices, and allows us to respond to incidents and alerts more quickly than we had ever been able to do in the past.”

Northern Trust realised the following benefits after deploying CounterACT:

Comprehensive, real-time visibility of the network, including endpoints, that are neither Trust-owned nor managed, e.g. medical, clinical engineering and BMS devices
Real-time visibility of over 15,000 endpoints and proactive remediation of potential threats to guard against rogue users, devices and applications
Secure and continuous network connectivity, which helps Northern Trust deliver uninterrupted critical health and social care services
Increased ICT security and governance controls via simple policy configuration
Easier and faster compliance reporting, e.g. Information Governance and ISO 27001, reducing manual overhead
Rapid internal threat identification and remediation

“The approach we’ve been taking is to manage restrictions on connectivity such that they are at an absolute minimum, whilst maintaining appropriate levels of security and governance. In the health sector connectivity - and indeed security - for medical devices, in particular, is essential in terms of uninterrupted delivery of critical health and social care services,” explained Black. “With ForeScout we can rest assured that we have visibility and, all importantly, control over devices connecting to our network.”