ForeScout, a provider of network access control and policy compliance products, recently announced that the University of Rochester Medical Center has deployed its network security platform, CounterACT.
The medical center has reportedly seen an increased demand for personal devices in its bring-your-own-device policy that allows hospital personnel to operate their own smartphones, tablets, and other computers within the hospital’s network. There are currently more than 15,000 employee-owned devices of which hospital officials must keep track so they can keep life-saving medical systems operational while remaining in compliance with HIPAA and HITECH healthcare mandates. These demands have necessitated the installation of a new security system and therefore the CounterACT platform.
Michael Pinch, chief information security office of the medical center, commented on role security plays in controlling the vast number of devices on the hospital’s network.
“The healthcare sector is facing pressure to implement an effective BYOD strategy to address IT consumerization,” Pinch said. “Since this trend has brought more than 15,000 additional devices onto our network, we really needed to take the next step to enhance our network security, to gain a complete inventory of the devices connected to our network and to apply timely and appropriate controls.”
CounterACT allows the hospital’s IT department to gain an overview of how individual devices are affecting the network, maintain access control for individual devices, and address threats to the network within a single interface. Furthermore, CounterACT is also “agentless,” so it can communicate with medical devices that are also connected to the network. Pinch further commented that the department is able to create profiles for specific device and group similar devices together for easier management.
ForeScout did not mention in its announcement how long its security system has been operating at the medical center. However, it did mention that the center has had the system long enough to realize the benefits of comprehensive device monitoring and control, granular enforcement of security policies, simple classification of devices connected to the network, solid compliance with healthcare mandates, and IT resource savings by way of real-time asset intelligence.
The medical sector is not the only market sporting BYOD policies. The implementation of BYOD policies in businesses worldwide has given rise to a growth in the BYOD security market. TMC reported earlier this year that a ResearchandMarkets report predicts a compound annual growth rate of the BYOD security market of 31.95 percent through 2018. Employee demand for use of their own devices, as well as the complexity of networks and of cyber attacks, is what makes this growth a reality. As a result, there will likely be an uptick in the number of calls for implementations of products such as ForeScout’s CounterACT.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
