Varonis helps Ipswich Hospital prevent a data haemorrhage

DatAnywhere is Varonis’ ground-breaking solution for secure, cloud-style file synchronization 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. As you’d expect from a medical and public sector organisation, it is important that strict control is maintained over what is published outside of the hospital. By having a dedicated file services environment, Ipswich Hospital’s manageability is kept simple.

Karl Kroger, data and security administrator from Ipswich Hospital explains, “Thanks to Varonis DatAnywhere, Ipswich Hospital now has a secure connection to our data, end-to-end, making life easier and more efficient for our staff, our non-exec 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, but 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.

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