“The end goal was more security because we are hosting a lot of services and patient information. We found CIRA was working really well for us at a very good price. Implementation is simple and support has been fast and high quality.”
-Julien Franche
Senior Systems Analyst
Situation
The Winchester District Memorial Hospital serves a large rural geographic area outside of Ottawa under the message, “we’re here for you”. Their services include a 24/7 emergency department, inpatient medical and surgical services and obstetrics/newborn care. Supporting services include laboratory, diagnostic imaging and pharmacy services. Their strategic plan outlines that information technology is among their unique strengths of the hospital.
Supporting such a large mandate from an IT perspective makes them not, “your typical hospital”. They run a data center for the LHINWorks eConsult solution, host the Eastern Ontario Regional Laboratory Association (EORLA) data and hosts the Risk and Incident Management System (RIMS) for 10 sites.
Problem
They have a significant security platform that includes an enterprise firewall with content filtering and malware sensors that can sniff traffic from East-West and North-South on their network. Despite this, there is always something that gets through and they find it is usually due to user error. They were looking for a way to add a layer of security under the strict budget available from the ministry for IT projects.
Solution
Because the security of patient information is so critical, additional protection in the form of a DNS firewall was deemed important. The cost-effectiveness, ease of set-up and quality of support made CIRA DNS Firewall an easy decision for the team. They have multiple DCs in their environment and set-up was as simple as sending their IP addresses to CIRA and configuring their DNS policies locally.
Result
CIRA DNS Firewall added an important additional layer of security for their network. In looking at a recent 30-day snapshot they registered 17 botnet blocks, 241 content filter blocks and 5 attempted (erroneous) clicks on phishing sites. In addition, the always-on cloud protection helped during two significant traditional firewall upgrades because it provided a secure layer for the network during upgrade.
