8e6 Technologies Provides The Cure for St. Jude's Internet Filtering and Reporting Needs
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Profile
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is the world's largest childhood cancer research center and America's third largest healthcare charity. Doctors from all over the world refer their patients to St. Jude because of its reputation as a premier center for the treatment of catastrophic diseases in children, primarily pediatric cancer. The hospital employs scientists from all nations and is proud to claim a Nobel Prize winner among its ranks. In addition, St. Jude is renowned for its exceptional care and devotion to children and their families: no child is ever turned away because of a family's inability to pay. To date, the hospital has treated more than 20,000 children from across the United States and 80 foreign countries.
Challenge
In 1999, St. Jude developed a policy outlining the acceptable use and intent of use for their Internet connection. Shortly after this policy was activated, the Information Security Department was asked to install and administer a pre-purchased Internet Monitoring and Filtering system to help ensure compliance of this policy. Manager of Information Security, Monroe Wesley, remembers the difficulties of their first monitoring/filtering solution. "
St. Jude had purchased Web monitoring software prior to my arrival to the organization. The product was difficult to administer and it was unsuccessful at detouring large amounts of inappropriate activities. We quickly began evaluating other Web monitoring solutions.” In their process of evaluating the market of Web monitoring/filtering products, St. Jude first selected three of the leading products that fit their requirements. This selection process was followed with an equal bench-test to determine which product was superior for their needs. Their choice was 8e6 Technologies’ R3000. "It was very clear 8e6 was the product St. Jude needed and wanted. The product was superior to the competition and we have been pleased with our decision to change," Wesley adds.
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is required to comply with HIPAA regulations, and although the regulations do not specifically define a Web monitoring and filtering solution should be administered, they do encourage taking necessary measures to protect patient information. One of the ways St. Jude uses the 8e6 R3000 to help protect the organization is by evaluating Web site classification, monitoring for access attempts, and blocking known malicious code, spyware, and virus type sites.
St. Jude is a research hospital where the scientific teams continually seek to translate knowledge acquired through basic research into novel approaches for clinical diagnosis and treatment. Scientists can spend large amounts of time researching on the Internet. Having the flexibility to customize the filtering in the ways necessary for compliance of the hospital's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) is accomplished with 8e6. Wesley shared, "The intent for monitoring and blocking at St. Jude is not to hinder any of the organization's purpose, but to help provide the proper work environment.” He added, "Do we have the potential to block a site needed for true organizational/business needs? Yes. However, with 8e6 we offer an option to submit a request for additional evaluation of the Web site blocked, which my department reviews the classification of the site and provides support to the requestor."
Solution
Wesley and his team found the R3000 provides the perfect solution for St. Jude. The R3000 sits at the network's gateway, where it makes use of deep packet inspection to scan all internal traffic heading out to the Web. When it spots a violating packet requesting a site in violation of policy, it takes fast action on two fronts. First, it sends a block page to the workstation that generated the request, typically within 2 to 4 ms. Then it sends a TCP reset to the site to cancel the session. By sealing off access to unauthorized sites so quickly, the R3000 prevents unauthorized Web access.
Recent enhancements to the R3000 make it even better suited to healthcare organizations struggling with HIPAA compliance. It now features IM blocking, so that employees who should be working rather than chatting won't put an organization's information and infrastructure at risk. As with URL filtering, this helps limit legal liability since employees can't IM, therefore they can't use it to transmit sensitive data. IM blocking also reduces the risk of virus infiltration. And in the 8e6 implementation, it serves as a baseline for P2P blocking-so that companies are protected against backdoor breaches from file-sharing sites.
In addition, Wesley finds one of the best things about the R3000 is the flexibility to compensate for certain words and their alternate meanings. "The R3000 provides the opportunity for customizing the rule sets to help promote the location of necessary information, while not completely opening access to the Web and its risks." He adds, "The R3000 is completely stable and we like the hardened-appliance configuration."
St. Jude also utilizes the Enterprise Reporter 3.0. The reporter is designed to give administrators complete flexibility by enabling the creation of custom reports from consolidated data. St Jude has a staff of over 3000, and the ER is able to handle their substantial amounts of Internet traffic because of a generous amount of internal storage. Finally, it is designed to make administration and report generation as simple and efficient as possible. Administrators can point and click through the screens and quickly set up the desired monitoring environment. "I am very impressed with the ER's reporting capability," Wesley says. "It does its job without any glitches or headache to the Information Security staff. Since implementing 8e6, our Internet usage policy monitoring and compliance has drastically improved.”
Result
The R3000 and Enterprise Reporter have both helped provide St. Jude with a seamless, multi-layered and cost-effective solution to ensure their policy compliance. In addition, the potential risks of malicious code, spyware, and virus type sites are monitored and blocked while inappropriate Internet use have been avoided. "It's a very cost-effective solution — its accuracy and reliability has saved us by not wasting our resources," Wesley says. "8e6 has a great product for any organization facing policy enforcement and/or compliance challenges. The system keeps running, monitoring, recording, and blocking, which is exactly what a customer would expect."
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