NHS organisations in south west Yorkshire have invested in a web gateway security appliance from Optenet to protect the 11,000-plus users on their books and ease the management of web security for IT administrators.

Optenet was chosen by The Health Informatics Service (THIS), a healthcare information management and technology (IM&T) provider, on behalf of its client organisations, which include Calderdale Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, NHS Wakefield District, Southwest Yorkshire Mental Health NHS Trust, Calderdale Primary Care Trust and NHS Kirklees.

The infrastructure managers chose Optenet's Secure Web Gateway appliance partly because of its superior manageability, according to Steve Shaw, senior confidentiality and IM&T security officer at THIS.

THIS previously had no dedicated web filtering solution, which meant that IT administrators had to work retrospectively to find evidence of any non-compliant web usage, often spending several hours each week manually reviewing web usage, said Shaw.

"This method took a lot of time and didn't always provide credible evidence, so we decided we needed a URL filtering system," he explained.

The centrally managed appliance-based solution also gives THIS the ability to load additional modules for solutions like anti-spam, anti-virus and firewall protection in the future, he added.

"Because of the nature of our business, there is the potential to gain new customers or lose existing ones, so we wanted a solution that could be scalable in both directions, and we felt Optenet helped us achieve this," said Shaw.