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AdviseInc | Transformation Services | SME
The Customer
AdviseInc provides tools and services which help NHS trusts make sense of healthcare spend data.
Their mission is to identify significant financial benefits for the healthcare system, by joining web-based analytics with commercial and clinical expertise, saving trusts money and improving efficiency. They supply the Price Benchmarking and Procurement Dashboard tools to a large number of healthcare organisations across Britain.
“We work with NHS data, so it’s important that we are doing everything we possibly can to make sure it’s secure.”
The Challenge
AdviseInc have a long-standing relationship with a Node4 Partner and had been sharing their bandwidth and infrastructure, hosted by Node4. While they’d never had any concerns with the quality of the hosting, they were ready to make some changes.
With the cyber security threat landscape ever-evolving, they wanted to adapt to ensure their data remained as secure as possible. Part of their plan was to introduce some separation between themselves and the Node4 Partner.
“We work with NHS data, so it’s important that we are doing everything we possibly can to make sure it’s secure,” says Ben Thomas, Senior Business Intelligence Consultant at AdviseInc. “We all work from home, so we needed a trusted hosting service that was not just going to provide 24/7 support for our customers, but that enabled us to do our analysis and development work remotely. It’s critical that our data is available, backed up and secure.”
The Solution
AdviseInc turned to Node4 as their trusted provider. “In all the time we’ve been working with Node4, via their Partner, we’ve had excellent service and no network outages, so Node4 was the obvious choice for us,” Ben explains.
Node4 introduced separation between AdviseInc and the Partner, while also enhancing security and resilience, with their N4Protect+ solution.
This involved moving AdviseInc’s servers behind their fully managed next generation firewalls. Node4 also implemented a VPN, providing AdviseInc’s workforce with a single, secure route into those virtual servers.
The N4Protect+ solution provides a Unified Threat Management Platform for content filtering and email management, as well as essential data leak prevention and intrusion detection. All these measures reduce the types of traffic that can potentially access the servers.
As well as getting a fully managed and supported solution, AdviseInc receives regular reports on throughput, threats and end-user behaviour, so they have full visibility over their network security.
The Results
“The biggest benefit for us is peace of mind,” says Ben.“We’re now working with Node4’s experts, whose day-to-day jobs are to ensure that the firewalls remain as robust as possible. This managed service with access to specialist knowledge about network configuration and management is great, as it gives us more time to concentrate on our core business.
“We knew that we wanted to make changes, but we weren’t sure about the best way to go about it. Node4 took the time to talk us through our infrastructure and what the infrastructure would look like after the migration. The team spent a long time with our infrastructure manager, just talking through the things we would need to do to prepare for migration and the things we’d need to do subsequently. This meant we felt fully prepared for the cutover, and we felt assured that we wouldn’t be cutting our customers off from services or our teams off from access to our servers.”
“We’d built up legacy infrastructure over six years of being in business, so we knew there would be some issues during the migration. What struck me was that the Node4 team worked professionally and methodically through issues as they came up. It was critical that we resumed services to NHS trusts as quickly as possible, and the team sacrificed additional hours to make sure that the impact on the customer was minimal. We returned to work the morning after the migration with no fuss and everything running smoothly – and that is largely thanks to Node4’s work. That kind of dedication is deeply appreciated.”
“Security threats are constantly evolving and adapting and here at AdviseInc, we’re always thinking about how we can stay several steps ahead of them. Node4’s solution ensures that, as the cyber security landscape evolves, we’ll continue to provide services that are secure, compliant and always available to our customers.”
Mat Oram, MD of AdviseInc
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