The Doctors Company Protects Its Mobile Workforce with Forescout CounterACT
CounterACT Manages the Unmanaged and Protects the Network – Inside and Out
Cupertino, Calif. – April 6, 2009 – CForescout Technologies, the market leader in network access control (NAC) for global enterprises, today announced that The Doctors Company, America’s leading physician-owned medical malpractice insurer, has deployed the CounterACT family of appliances for network access control and threat prevention in its eHealth network. Implemented across company sites, CounterACT protects The Doctors Company’s mobile workforce against malware, viruses and the danger of data theft.
“Prior to CounterACT, we took measures to protect our network against intrusive threats and removed vulnerable laptops from the network," said Johnny Lane, Network/Security Engineer at The Doctors Company. “With CounterACT, we were able to control access to our production LAN, bring all laptops back online quickly and protect against malware intrusion in real time."
Today’s insurance providers – like the Doctors Company – face a steady influx of vulnerabilities introduced by contractors and employees who are able to bypass physical security and gain network connection inside the perimeter defenses. CounterACT addresses this problem by enforcing network security policies across all managed and unmanaged network devices, including desktops and laptops as well as non-OS devices and USB drives, without the need for a software agent of any kind.
Under the direction of Craig Musgrave, CIO of The Doctors Company, Lane and his IT team were tasked to find ways to protect the company’s mobile workforce against malware and viral threats. After evaluating solutions from various vendors – including NAC, endpoint protection and switch providers – the organization chose CounterACT.
“CounterACT is ideally featured to help us manage the unmanaged. It’s an agentless NAC solution that can distinguish laptops from desktops and apply different security policies to each – without needlessly disrupting the users or forcing agent-based authentication onto every endpoint," said Lane.
CounterACT is an easy-to-deploy appliance that can be added without any changes to the network infrastructure. It has the ability to see and control every connected IP device down to the switch port. It provides complex policies to enable and enforce security processes and standards, performs access control without the need to first deploy 802.1x, and enforces actions such as peer-to-peer shutdown, post-connection monitoring for threat prevention, and detection/blocking of banned devices – such as USBs, where needed.
“Once again, CounterACT has proven to deliver the mix of real time network access control automation and threat prevention features that our customers require, without imposing heavy-handed or costly change to the infrastructure, " said Gord Boyce, President of Forescout. ” It’s these efficiencies that continue to make CounterACT a preferred NAC solution today, and the reason leading enterprise and government agencies choose it over costly embedded or inline solutions offered by switch vendors such as Cisco or Juniper."
The latest CounterACT innovations will be demonstrated in Forescout Booth #423 at the upcoming RSA Conference 2009, April 20-24, Moscone Center/San Francisco.
About Forescout Technologies, Inc.
Forescout enables organizations to continuously monitor and mitigate security exposures and cyber attacks. The company’s CounterACT appliance dynamically identifies and evaluates network users, endpoints and applications to provide visibility, intelligence and policy-based mitigation of security problems. Forescout’s open ControlFabric architecture allows a broad range of IT security products and management systems to share information and automate remediation actions. Because Forescout’s solutions are easy to deploy, unobtrusive, extensible and scalable, as of January 1, 2015, they have been chosen by more than 1,800 of the world’s most secure enterprises and government agencies in over 62 countries. Headquartered in Campbell, California, Forescout offers its solutions through its global network of authorized partners. Learn more at www.forescout.com.