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Background
Quantros is a technology company driven by a vision of using technology to improve health care, particularly patient safety in hospitals. They provide an ASP solution that enables hospitals to aggregate safety data and to report adverse events.
At this 60-person company, Bryan Rood was the first person in IT (now a 4- person department). He leads IT and in doing so wears many hats. He is responsible for using technology to meet the needs of the business and clients. This consists of planning and designing the network, building and assessing capacity, implementing all operating systems, applications, and technology services (such as Windows, Linux, and Oracle), and monitoring and maintaining them. He also serves as the system admin and is responsible for writing the company’s HIPAA compliance documents. If that weren’t enough, he often interfaces with customers in performing aspects of professional services.
Oh, and he’s also responsible for all aspects of information security. Challenges faced Like others in IT and in information security, Bryan faces numerous challenges in juggling everything. His key challenges include:
__ Lack of time and resources. Quantros has a limited budget for IT and for security, and limited resources to implement any types of solutions. Any solution they consider needs to be simple and easy to implement and needs to increase the productivity of IT. In addition, because resources are limited, any potential solution has to fit within the company’s existing network and architecture.
__ Developing, implementing, and enforcing security policies. Bryan rates this as his greatest challenge. He understands the need for security policies, but implementing and enforcing these policies is time consuming and difficult.
__ Minimizing infrastructure. As a small company, Quantros wants to minimize its expenditures in IT infrastructure. In addition to the expense, they want to minimize latency and simplify the management of the infrastructure.
__ Maximizing system uptime. Bryan was given a mandate to improve uptime for clients by decreasing IT’s maintenance windows. The desire was to do maintenance less frequently and to do it faster.
Enter Blue Lane
With these challenges in mind, Quantros took steps including pursuing virtualization (to minimize its IT infrastructure costs) and the company created a budget to purchase an IPS solution.
In the course of implementing virtualization, Quantros’ virtualization partner suggested that they learn about Blue Lane as a way to improve, encapsulate, and protect everything that was being virtualized.
An investigation into Blue Lane’s capabilities led Bryan to conclude that Blue Lane could provide protection for those servers being virtualized, but he was also interested in protecting the company’s other servers as well (totaling about 40).
The next step was conducting a small pilot. This pilot involved using Blue Lane’s technology on one unprotected Quantros server. Blue Lane immediately identified and shielded the vulnerabilities that existed. Bryan characterized this as “the most impressive proof of concept demonstration I’ve ever seen.” And, noteworthy about the demonstration was that it was all done without even touching or bringing down the server.
Following this demonstration, Bryan’s biggest challenge was an internal one of convincing his management to shift the budget that had been allocated to IPS to purchase Blue Lane. The argument was that Blue Lane’s solution provided many of the protective benefits of an IPS (especially preventing a network-based attack from getting to a server), but offered a host of additional benefits as well.
When Quantros decided to use Blue Lane for all of its servers—both virtual and physical—Blue Lane sent out skilled engineers to assist in the implementation. They helped develop a flexible methodology to protect all of Quantros’ servers at the lowest possible cost.
Blue Lane’s Benefits for Quantros
While Quantros implemented Blue Lane less than six months ago, the benefits they have realized have been immediate and significant. They include:
__ Immediate server information. Immediately upon deploying Blue Lane, Quantros had information on the security status of every one of its servers.
__ Immediate shielding of all servers. Quantros’ experience was that immediately upon deploying Blue Lane, all of its Windows, Linux, and Oracle servers were shielded. Bryan Rood observed that Blue Lane mitigates the effects of unpatched vulnerabilities faster than any vendor’s solution.
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