Healthcare Case Study

The Cooper Health System (Cooper Health), in Camden County, NJ, is the premier provider of comprehensive health services and advanced medical technology in the southern part of the state. With two primary operating divisions—hospital-based services, including Cooper University Hospital and The Children’s Regional Hospital at Cooper, and a multi-physician practice—Cooper Health is one of the largest employers in southern New Jersey. Its annual revenues are approximately $420 million.

Just One Incident Can Be Disaster

Cooper Health’s large IT infrastructure provides access for thousands of personnel—internally to the Internet—so system security is the number one priority. "We need to make sure no one accesses inappropriate material,” said Dr. Simon Samaha, CIO and VP of IT at Cooper Health.

Prohibiting access to inappropriate materials is just the tip of the security iceberg. Dr. Samaha and his staff also face the issue of non-productive websites. Employees were unintentionally opening security holes in the network, bringing viruses and malicious code into the IT environment. “We needed a solution to protect us from the outside and the inside,” said Dr. Samaha, “but how could we implement intrusion technology without tripling our staff? The technology requires hands-on maintenance and monitoring. We wanted something that was transparent and self-efficient without requiring too much human interaction.”

	Our policy has been more of ‘let’s avoid bad public relations issues’ rather than ‘let’s look for an ROI.’ eTrust Intrusion Detection has helped us achieve that policy.
		Dr. Simon Samaha, CIO and VP of IT The Cooper Health System

Nothing Compares to eTrust Intrusion Detection

Cooper Health looked at two other vendors before settling on eTrust Intrusion Detection from Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA). “We needed a product with the scalability for push technology. CA’s solution was the only one,” said Dr. Samaha. “With eTrust Intrusion Detection push technology, the system can send an email alert to the appropriate people saying that someone has accessed an inappropriate website.” He also wanted to block access to inappropriate sites, and monitor and record users’ attempts to access the sites.

The audit trail that eTrust Intrusion Detection provides through its logs is important for confronting or firing an employee because of inappropriate web usage. eTrust Intrusion Detection documents the evidence, which is easily extracted. Cooper Health started seeing results from the moment eTrust Intrusion Detection was implemented. “The day we were testing it,” said Dr. Samaha, “we turned on a local alert, and it started pinging. The source was the library below me, and I found someone on an ‘unproductive’ website.”

They also got the hands-off, self-managed environment they wanted. “We’ve had eTrust Intrusion Detection for almost a year now,” said Dr. Samaha, “and it runs on its own. It does the blocking, monitoring and alerting the way it’s set up to. It updates itself from the Internet once a week. It’s a self-managed environment. And it works with the other components we have, like the firewall. Most of the other software we looked at required specific technology and was blind to the technology we have.”

“Our network is connected to a university network,” added Dr. Samaha. “eTrust Intrusion Detection was doing its job, watching for unusual patterns such as flooding of packets or too much traffic, when we received an alert saying we were being attacked. It turned out that it was the beginning of a problem on the university network. There was a misconfiguration on a machine and it started to flood our network. eTrust Intrusion Detection really helped us avoid a potentially serious problem because of that.”

eTrust Intrusion Detection Provides Peace of Mind

The benefits keep piling up since eTrust Intrusion Detection was implemented, but the biggest benefit, according to Dr. Samaha, has been peace of mind. “Our policy has been more of ‘let’s avoid bad public relations issues’ rather than ‘let’s look for an ROI.’ eTrust Intrusion Detection has helped us achieve that policy,” said Dr. Samaha.