Varonis helps Ipswich Hospital prevent data haemorrhage

Varonis Systems has helped Ipswich Hospital allow both internal and external access to confidential documents outside of office hours and while off-site, but in a controlled and secure manner.

Since implementing Varonis DatAnywhere, the hospital, which employs 3,500 and serves 360,000 people in East Suffolk, has been able to reduce costs associated with printing documents and removed the risk of that printed material going astray.

In addition to cost savings, DatAnywhere has dramatically improved productivity for both the administrative team responsible for preparing papers and the board members, who can view materials at their convenience

In addition, its busy accident and emergency consultants can now share and conveniently view the work schedule to check shift times − which often change at the last minute − while away from the hospital.

DatAnywhere is Varonis’ ground-breaking solution for secure, cloud-style file synchronisation and sharing that instantly transforms enormous file-sharing environments into private clouds, providing mobile access from any device to large volumes of data without moving those files from existing file servers. DatAnywhere is free for five users and free to try for more.

Using DatAnywhere, Ipswich Hospital has created a dedicated environment where required materials are stored, for example, patient files shared with third parties or large data repositories and other sensitive documents where access is needed on an ad hoc basis.

Karl Kroger, data and security administrator at Ipswich Hospital, said: “Thanks to Varonis DatAnywhere, the hospital now has a secure connection to its data end-to-end, making life easier and more efficient for our staff, our non-executive directors, and other organisations with which we interact.

Varonis has reduced the cost of regularly printing board papers and minutes, thereby reducing the risk of this printed material going astray. My team and I can see what is being shared and with whom, which is something we couldn’t do without Varonis.”

DatAnywhere in Action

The hospital has several boards and committees, comprising a mixture of employees and external members of the public – non-executive directors. Before DatAnywhere, board papers would be produced ahead of meetings and physically circulated. This is now a thing of the past.

“Today, its external non-executive directors can access prepared board documents instantly, which can be updated right up to the start of, and can be viewed throughout, meetings. In addition to the cost savings, DatAnywhere has dramatically improved productivity for both the administrative team responsible for preparing papers and the board members, who can view materials at their convenience.

Kroger said: “Varonis DatAnywhere is so user friendly and intuitive, therefore training wasn’t even necessary for many.”

Thanks to Varonis DatAnywhere, the hospital now has a secure connection to its data end-to-end, making life easier and more efficient for our staff, our non-executive directors, and other organisations with which we interact

Speaking about how the hospital’s emergency department team has been able to stop sharing and viewing the work schedule using a cloud-based facility, he added: “For our emergency doctors, who are a little harder to get to simply because they are just so busy and they work shifts, they’ve been able to get up and running with minimal interaction from IT. Feedback has been that it’s intuitive, and we’ve not had any issues of anyone not understanding what is required.”

Ipswich Hospital has also found DatAnywhere invaluable for securely sharing patient documents with third parties such as solicitor firms and other medical professionals.

Kroger said: “DatAnywhere has introduced a number of benefits beyond the original remit. We now have the ability to share files with third parties – for example, we sometimes have requests to view the ‘log files’, which are very large, and we can use DatAdvantage to share these.”