Customer Success Stories
“In addition to the guest networking and threat prevention capabilities CounterACT provides, we also get immediate access to a great deal of information we couldn't get before.”
The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital Manages Guest Network Access with ForeScout CounterACT
Challenge:
- Based in Columbus, Ohio, the Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital is one of the largest pediatric research centers in the U.S.
- The Institute hosts visiting medical researchers who need access to the Internet while on campus.
- The Institute has sensitive data that they need to protect -- research data, patient and financial information.
- They needed a solution that would help them grant guests access to the internet while protecting sensitive data against unauthorized access.
- They also wanted a way to ensure anti-virus and security vulnerability patches were up-to-date on the institute’s own Windows and Mac devices.
Solution:
- Senior Network Engineer Scott Kowal and his colleagues began to evaluate NAC solutions in 2007 and discovered ForeScout met their primary goals. Kowal and team plugged ForeScout into their network environment to ensure it worked with their existing infrastructure and that policy creation would be straightforward and non-disruptive to the network.
- According to Scott Kowal, Senior Network Engineer at The Research Institute:
“ForeScout CounterACT gives us everything we need to grant guests access to the internet, to prevent users from connecting personal laptops to our network, and to detect and prevent malware from entering our network. And it does much more. It provides our helpdesk with a great deal of instant information we couldn’t get before. For example, we can see who’s connected to what switch, who was the last person to log into the network on a specific Windows PC, user IP address, and more. This kind of information is invaluable to the helpdesk.”
Results:
- Guest Management.
“Guests are restricted from accessing the enterprise network if they plug into a port in a conference room. Employees can connect and gain normal corporate access using the same port. And CounterACT recognizes and blocks unauthorized devices on the enterprise network such as personal laptops.”
- Corporate Policy Enforcement.
“CounterACT recognizes when unauthorized applications are running, such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications, which are against our policy. When one of these applications is identified, someone on the IT team is alerted and we work with the user to ensure it is removed.”
- Threat Prevention.
“The ability for CounterACT to block threats on our network is terrific. We weren’t expecting this in a NAC product -- what a bonus! When CounterACT sees non-standard traffic, it takes action. It recently recognized a spyware attack and immediately stopped it in its tracks.”
- Transparent Device Interrogation.
“CounterACT is seamless to users— they don’t even know their devices are being interrogated because it’s non-disruptive.”
- Ease of Use.
“We appreciate the logical layout of CounterACT and how easy it is to use and implement. Helpdesk employees, who have full access to the console, find it simple to navigate. When technical people - who usually have strong opinions - don’t complain, that’s really saying something.”