Byram Healthcare Deploys Security Appliance

Like other health-care companies, Byram Healthcare Centers Inc. has Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act deadlines to meet. But the company, a leading supplier of health-care products to the home, also needed better security throughout its entire IT infrastructure. So Byram decided to deploy a Fortinet FortiGate-800 appliance, along with FortiReporter Security Analyzer for proactive monitoring and log reporting.

"There were vulnerabilities when I came in," says CIO Richard Entrup. The company runs 50 Linux servers and takes advantage of open-source software and components whenever possible. "We had some antivirus capabilities but needed much deeper logging at a more intrinsic level, and intrusion prevention became our core requirement."

Anthony Acquanita, senior systems administrator at Byram, chose Fortinet over Symantec because the appliance offered more features and was more robust. One such feature has the appliance replacing an open-source Squid Web proxy server. "We can run the FortiGate appliance in transparent mode, and upload it onto the network with very little impact," says Acquanita. "It's a real quick install."

Fortinet is helping make the entire infrastructure more secure. "We have much more granular views of intrusion information," says CIO Entrup. "We've had a Cisco firewall, but Fortinet is the one bringing all the information together."