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16 Nov 2011 - Global IT security and data protection firm Sophos today announced that the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust in the UK has deployed Sophos endpoint anti-virus protection and Sophos web filtering to protect its IT network, which includes 6,000 end user devices across three hospitals and a clinic.

NHS IT security specialist and Sophos partner, BMS, had a long-standing relationship with the Trust and both proposed the solution and provided additional migration services to make switching from Heart of England’s previous anti-virus and web security providers even easier.

The Heart of England Trust is one of the leading foundation trusts in the UK, with over 10,000 employees providing general and specialist hospital care for the people of East Birmingham, Solihull, Sutton Coldfield, Tamworth and South Staffordshire. The Trust needed to implement comprehensive protection for the network, as well as all end user devices – including laptops and desktops – that was easy to manage and provided concise, flexible reporting tools.

The Heart of England Trust now uses Sophos’s web filtering to protect the network from viruses, as well as to help improve the productivity of staff by enabling granular management of internet use. Sophos’s live look-up technology also allows staff to securely connect to the network on laptops from remote locations.

“We needed to review our suppliers for several aspects of our IT security, and ideally were looking to work with a company that could offer all the solutions we needed in a single, easy-to-manage package,” said Didier Meert, Head of Technical Services, at the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust. “Sophos has a good reputation within the NHS and we found that it could offer everything we were looking for out of the box. Since implementing Sophos’s technology, we’ve found that the ease of reporting and management using one single interface has improved our security operations significantly. Sophos’s solutions are simple and easy to manage, providing us with effective protection, without requiring a lot of ongoing attention.”

The Heart of England Trust has initially rolled out Sophos web filtering and anti-virus protection, however it intends to implement email filtering/encryption and USB device protection in the near future. The Trust will also implement solutions to protect tablet devices as these are becoming more widely used by the hospitals and clinic. These solutions are included in Sophos’s offering and could prove vital since Sophos’s daily reporting has identified that removable devices are the cause of the majority of viruses across the network of hospitals.

“Sophos’s easy-to-use interface and management suite means that The Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust is able to scale its protection as required, to incorporate new devices such as tablets,” said Jonathan Lee, Healthcare Sector Manager UK&I at Sophos. “Thanks to the flexibility of Sophos’s solutions, we are able to protect the network and all end-user devices across the Trust, helping to keep confidential information secure.”

“I’m delighted that we have been able to consolidate these IT security solutions, including endpoint, web and email security, for the Heart of England NHS Trust by utilising the excellent Sophos range thus delivering greater functionality at a reduced cost. This is a great example of an ‘NHS spend to save’ project,” said Tina Tsoukatos, Managing Director at BMS.