Electronic Health Reporter

ForeScout Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of pervasive network security solutions for Global 2000 enterprises and government organizations, today announced that the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) has deployed ForeScout CounterACT to fortify network security in light of increased bring-your-own-device (BYOD) demand among the center’s doctors, researchers and other personnel. In addition to managing over 15,000 employee-owned devices on the URMC network, the center is leveraging the solution to gain operational oversight of network endpoints, including medical devices and life-saving systems, as well as to support compliance with federal healthcare mandates such as HIPAA and HITECH.

URMC is one of the nation’s top academic medical centers and the hub of the university’s patient care, health research, teaching and community outreach missions. The center has three hospitals, medical schools and research facilities aside from the university.

“The healthcare sector is facing pressure to implement an effective BYOD strategy to address IT consumerization,” said Michael Pinch, chief information security officer (CISO) for URMC. “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.”

ForeScout CounterACT enables IT organizations to efficiently address network visibility, access control, endpoint compliance and threat management challenges in today’s increasingly complex enterprise networks. Beyond gaining greater operational insight, the URMC IT team leverages the ForeScout ControlFabric architecture to integrate CounterACT with its existing network and security infrastructure. The technology allows CounterACT and the center’s other systems to share intelligence and better respond to security exposures.

“CounterACT’s agentless approach was key, as was its ability to give us full visibility into all devices, including medical devices connected to or attempting to connect to our network,” said Pinch. “Its flexible policy engine also played a big role in the selection process as it allows us to profile and group devices, enforce access and compliance policies, and remediate potential security gaps quickly and easily.”

URMC realized the following benefits after deploying CounterACT:

• Comprehensive monitoring and control over network connections and devices ranging from smartphones and tablets to heart monitors, medical kiosks and ultrasound machines
• Agentless inspection and granular enforcement of security policies on devices requesting access to or currently accessing network resources
• Seamless integration with network infrastructure and access enforcement leveraging CounterACT’s virtual firewall technology, enabling URMC to logically create segregated wired and wireless networks based on user role and personal health information (PHI) scope
• Easy classification, grouping and monitoring of medical devices to detect malfunctioning or malicious behavior that negates FDA issues with introducing software on healthcare equipment
• Fortified HIPAA and HITECH compliance practices, including automated means to maintain and validate encryption safe harbor
• Greater IT resource savings through real-time asset intelligence, continuous monitoring and automated response

About ForeScout Technologies, Inc.
ForeScout delivers pervasive network security by allowing organizations to continuously monitor and mitigate security exposures and cyberattacks. The company’s CounterACT platform dynamically identifies and assesses network users, endpoints and applications to provide visibility, intelligence and policy-based mitigation of security issues. ForeScout’s open ControlFabric technology allows a broad range of IT security products and management systems to share information and automate remediation actions. Because ForeScout’s solutions are easy to deploy, unobtrusive, flexible and scalable, they have been chosen by more than 1,700 enterprises and government agencies in 54 countries. Headquartered in Campbell, California, ForeScout offers its solutions through its network of authorized partners worldwide. Learn more at www.forescout.com.