Security Enterprise All-Stars

Guide to the '06 All-Stars Winners alphabetical listing WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY Applications | LANs & Routers | Network Management | OS, Servers & Data Center | Security | Storage | WAN, VoIP & Convergence | Wireless & Mobility WINNERS BY INDUSTRY Construction | Education | Financial Services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Media | Retail | Travel/Transportation | Utilities Vendors to the All-Stars

FirstHealth of the Carolinas believes in preventive medicine, an attitude that extends to its corporate network health.

In a little more than a year, the company went from a reactive security posture that relied solely on antivirus, firewalls and VPNs to an active security infrastructure based on state-of-the-art tools working in concert and controlled by a centralized security-management application.

For this aggressive yet studied approach to security - and especially its management - FirstHealth earns a 2006 Enterprise All-Star Award. Faced with an increasing number of zero-day attacks, this private, not-for-profit healthcare network serving 15 counties in the mid-Carolinas realized its old security setup wasn't working anymore.

"Antivirus vendors couldn't get security patches out quick enough. Sometimes attacks were going around the world in less than two hours," says Jonathan Campbell, technology director at FirstHealth, in Pinehurst, N.C.

With Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) security requirements mandating the confidentiality, integrity and availability of hospital data, the problem became clear. "We needed a better way," Campbell says.

In January 2005, the group decided to implement a variety of tools intended to secure the network from host to perimeter. These included Cisco host-based intrusion-detection and -prevention sensors, as well as new wireless security and monitoring systems and Websense for Internet filtering. The key, Campbell says, was ensuring that every new security piece could be managed from a single, centralized application - Network Intelligence's Envision.