Fortinet, a leading provider of cyber security solutions, has announced that the King Hamad University Hospital (KHUH) has leveraged the Fortinet Security Fabric. The solutions deployed include FortiGate enterprise firewalls and FortiMail email security solutions, to protect a network of 1,200 employees from email spam and malware. The Fortinet Security Fabric provides KHUH with an integrated and adaptive end-to-end security architecture to protect its entire distributed network through a single management interface.
Located in Muharraq, Kingdom of Bahrain, King Hamad University Hospital provides medical services utilizing the best therapeutic and administrative practices, and academic and research services, with an independent budget attached to the Bahrain Defense Force’s budget. The healthcare institution currently has nine internal wards and a capacity of 311 beds within its 172,000 square meter facility.
To protect its network environment, KHUH previously relied on several security products from different vendors, and encountered a number of challenges managing the disparate solutions and effectively dealing with threats. KHUH decided to replace its existing security infrastructure with one single vendor to increase the effectiveness and integration of its security while reducing complexity.
“Cyber threats are a constant source of growing concern for healthcare organizations. Without an integrated and adaptive security infrastructure and limited IT staff to manage various solutions, KHUH’s network was difficult to manage and safeguard from the expanding and evolving threat landscape. We found that only Fortinet provides a comprehensive, end-to-end security solution that is adaptive, extremely easy to manage, and provides the security features and performance necessary to keep our corporate and patient data safe,” said Major Khalid Al Khalifa, CIO – ICT Department, King Hamad University Hospital. “A three-member team is currently responsible for managing the security solution, but thanks to the intuitive interface and integration of all the Fortinet solutions, the hospital’s team did not need training on the new appliances. The team now spends just one hour on the appliances each day, with the majority of time spent on fine tuning.”
After conducting an analysis of competing solutions, KHUH selected Fortinet because its solutions met a full range of performance levels that adapted to the hospitals stringent compliance and regulation requirements. King Hamad University Hospital deployed a variety of Fortinet’s solutions including the FortiDDoS advanced DDoS protection for datacenters, FortiGate enterprise firewalls offering Antivirus, Web filtering, and Anti Spam capabilities; and FortiMail email security solutions to stop email threats and protect sensitive information.
The healthcare institution has also deployed Fortinet’s FortiCache high-performance web caching that reduces bandwidth needs, accelerates applications, and increases network performance while preventing access to dangerous content with integrated web filtering. Additionally, with Fortinet’s FortiAnalyzer 1000D, a centralized logging and reporting appliance, KHUH is able to log daily data from all FortiGate enterprise firewalls and create statistics and reports.
KHUH has also subscribed to Fortinet’s FortiGuard services, which consistently provides cyber security protection against content and network level threats. The service is powered by Fortinet’s global threat research team, FortiGuard Labs, and offers up-to-date security expertise and threat signature updates, which are delivered in real-time to Fortinet devices around the world.
“The Middle East cyber threat landscape is very active, and businesses have to invest in cutting edge solutions that protect their assets and staff from current and future threats. Email has long been a favorite attack vector of cyber criminals and is often an early stage of advanced threats. But not only do you need to keep threats from getting in, you need to keep data from getting out,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President – Middle East, Fortinet. “The Fortinet Security Fabric provides organizations like KHUH with an integrated, collaborative, end-to-end security architecture that protects the entire IT infrastructure through a single management interface. Our company consistently invests in improving its solutions, and the results show – King Hamad University Hospital evaluated many solutions and ultimately selected Fortinet as its security partner of choice.”
