Chelsea and Westminster improves firewall protection

NHS trust consolidates firewalls to speedup throughput

Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust has improved firewall protection on its new Gigabit network.

The Trust has consolidated all of its Check Point firewalls onto Crossbeam Systems’ C-Series platforms to enable greater throughput and reduce management complexity.

It was running its Check Point firewall on Sun Solaris servers but had concerns that they would slow down the transfer of data on the new Gigabit network, and chose Crossbeam because of its ability to support increased port density and multi-Gigabit throughput speeds.

Its new Gigabit network links the Trust’s five sites and enables quick and secure access to online patient records and supports other services such as Numbers for Babies, which allows the immediate registration of births.

Apart from staff, the network is accessed by other authorised NHS organisations, including local Primary Healthcare Trusts, and external trusted third parties.

Due to high usage demands on the network and the Trust’s need to transport and protect timely and sensitive patient data, it is crucial that its firewalls do not create a bottleneck in the flow of information.

The new Crossbeam appliance has a single management interface, so IT staff no longer have to manage the server and its operating system, as well as its firewalls.

Bill Gordon, assistant director of IT for the Trust, said the level of security necessary to safeguard sensitive data on the network ‘can’t negatively impact on the speed of the network. There are many occasions when hospital staff simply must have immediate access to online information.’

‘By consolidating our Check Point firewalls onto Crossbeam platforms we have been able to maintain our robust security policies whilst at the same time boosting network performance,’ he said.

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