Cloud Security For The Healthcare Industry: A No-Brainer

The healthcare industry has become one of the likeliest to suffer cyber-attacks, and there’s little wonder why. Having the financial and personal information of scores of patients makes it a very appetizing target for attackers.

Just over a year ago, the WannaCry ransomware attack wreaked havoc on the UK National Health Service (NHS), ultimately disrupting a third of its facilities and causing a rash of canceled appointments and operations.

As healthcare organizations face the prospect of increasing attack, their security teams look to cybersecurity experts with comprehensive, tested products to protect the sensitive information they hold. ALYN Woldenberg Family Hospital, Israel’s only pediatric rehabilitation facility, is no exception.

With a database of more than 70,000 patients and a website hosted in four languages and across three different domains; ALYN Hospital’s IT team was concerned that their content management system (CMS) could be vulnerable. The team didn’t feel their cybersecurity vendor was updating the security on their CMS as often as they should, leading them to go looking for a new vendor.

Initially checking out on-premises WAF systems, ALYN’s team kept coming up against the cost of securing their sites and, because of strict government regulations, they were initially hesitant to move to a cloud-based system. Ultimately, however, they decided that the Imperva Incapsula cloud-based WAF was just the thing, as it meets the most stringent enterprise-grade security criteria.

“We looked at community reviews and talked with colleagues at other hospitals and got the impression that Incapsula is one of the best in terms of cost-benefit ratio, which is important to us, in addition to robustness, ease-of-use, and integration, which was very smooth. It all proved to be correct, for which I am very glad,” said Uri Inbar, Director of IT for ALYN Hospital.

Setting up the system took less than a day and ALYN Hospital still manages its servers in-house, with a staff member who is now dedicated to security. Imperva Incapsula has been low maintenance from the start, so, while customer support was with them every step of the way at the beginning, they haven’t needed any for the last few years because the automatic system, managed and tuned by a team of Imperva security experts, has been running smoothly on its own.

“It gives us peace of mind to know that someone has dedicated themselves to the subject and keeps us updated. It’s one less worry to take care of.”

Since making the switch, ALYN Hospital has seen some significant improvements:

• Increased visibility for monitoring security threats: The Imperva Incapsula (now Imperva Cloud Application Security) dashboard is easy to use and provides information that helps ALYN Hospital keep its systems secure. And for their special projects, they can even see which countries are generating the most traffic.
• Good cost-benefit ratio: One of the most important aspects of any new security system for ALYN, the costs were reasonable, especially given the security benefits they received from the Incapsula system.
• Faster content delivery: While no formal studies were done, the IT staff has heard from some users that their CDN is delivering content faster than before.

Imperva Incapsula offers a single stack solution that integrates content delivery, website security, DDoS protection, and load balancing. Incapsula is PCI-compliant, has customizable security rules and offers 24/7 support.