Serving a community of approximately 525,000 people across East Sussex, the Trust is one of the largest organisations in the county employing over 6,000 dedicated staff with an annual turnover of £365 million. With increased use of information technology systems for both clinical and administrative tasks, the Trust has seen a steady rise in requests for secure remote access, which its legacy solution had struggled to address.

“We did not feel that our legacy solution and managed service was able to address our growing secure access requirements,” explains Dan Lloyd, senior infrastructure engineer at East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, “In addition, it was assessed that an upgrade would allow us to make considerable saving in ongoing charges along with use of more self-service tools, for user on-boarding and maintenance, that would provide additional cost savings in terms of management time, without compromising security.”

After examining a number of options, the Trust approached AN Security for guidance on developing a new secure access solution. Working in partnership using AN Security’s “Co-Driver” approach, the Trust’s IT department and teams from AN Security managed different aspects of the end to end solution including the design phase, implementation with additional steps such as failover testing, configuration management, bespoke training and support in meeting NHS security compliance requirements.

The project included upgrading its VPN infrastructure to new Pulse Secure ‘Connect Secure’ appliances to cope with a larger number of users accessing services, using a wider range of devices. This upgrade included the enablement of a number of secure self-service tools to simplify access for guests along with easier moves, adds and changes for existing users. The new solution uses active device scanning prior to connection to the Trust’s network, to ensure that devices have the correct updates and patches before they are given access to sensitive applications. The next stage upgraded its existing two factor authentication solution; to use a smartphone based App, that further reduced management overheads associated with handling physical two factor authentication tokens.

“The project has delivered against our expectations and we estimate that it will achieve cost savings of around 30% compared to our legacy solution, in respect to our secure access requirements,” says Lloyd, “AN Security has been with us across every step of the process and provided us with expert guidance and practical support, and the end result is a securer and easier to manage environment that is able to scale in line with our needs.”