Overview
Omega Healthcare Management Services, a front-runner in the healthcare service space in India was founded in 2004, and today has a presence in Bengaluru, Chennai, Trichy, Bhimavaram and Hyderabad in India, and Manila & Cebu in the Philippines. Omega handles value-driven work pertaining to provider & healthcare solutions, payer solutions, pharma solutions, analytic solutions and related technology solutions for large US-based companies. Omega Healthcare currently has more than 13,000 employees.
Challenge
As a healthcare services outsourcing company, Omega Healthcare deals with a widerange of patient data, including personally identifiable information (PII). Securing patientdata is essential to protecting the company from legal risk, in addition to safeguarding its reputation and preventing revenue loss.
While performing work-related activities on the internet, employees have a tendency to visit websites deemed risky by IT, including public domain e-mail and cloud storage websites. Sometimes, they mistakenly visit corrupted websites containing maliciouscode. Hence, restricting users from accessing unfavorable web traffic, thus ensuring thesecurity and privacy of patient data, is the company’s top priority.
Omega Healthcare had been using a firewall to control internet access. However, the firewall was capable of restricting access only by category and not at the user level. Thismeant that some of the websites - many of which were not work related - could still be accessed by the employees.
Solution
The company needed a solution that would provide a foolproof way to manage and control internet access. Keeping this requirement in mind, Bangaru Babu and other members of Omega Healthcare’s IT department began evaluating various solutions available in the market.
Forcepoint Web Filtering Proxy made an impression for a number of reasons:
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It allowed project-wide customization, a critical feature for a company with thou- sands of employees working on multiple projects
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It could also be integrated with the active directory, thus allowing user-based accesscontrol, a more efficient method of restricting unwanted websites
According to Babu, “Depending on the kind of work, each project group has different internet access requirements. As Forcepoint allowed internet access restrictions to beconfigured differently for different project members, it turned out to be the perfect fit.”
Forcepoint also had an advantage because of the flexible deployment options offered,since Forcepoint Web Security supports the management of different proxy gatewaysspread across different locations and platforms (e.g. appliances, virtual appliances, software-based deployments, roaming users).
Results
Forcepoint Web Filtering Proxy successfully underwent a Proof of Concept (PoC) trial,during which all regularly visited websites were analyzed. Running these sites through the proxy quickly proved to be valuable. In just few hours all work-related websites wereset to permit and non work-related websites were filtered out.
With traffic limited only to secure websites, Forcepoint’s solution mitigated security risk stemming from the sharing of confidential patient information over public internetdomains. The risk of downloading malicious content was also avoided. Catching unau-thorized access or misuse was simplified, since the IT team could now quickly trace itback through the proxy.
Forcepoint Web Filtering Proxy created cost benefits in addition to those seen by securityprofessionals. Employee productivity spiked shortly after the deployment, since IT could now restrict access to non- work-related websites, such as those related to gaming andsocial networking. With no annual license renewal fee, Forcepoint’s solution is signifi-cantly less expensive compared to the earlier firewall solution.