ANSecurity has announced a successful project involving all of the NHS operating groups within Lincolnshire that has dramatically reduced licencing costs, while improving access to more sites, across a wider range of devices with simplified management requirements.
The unified remote access service deployed by ANSecurity is shared within a community of interest network (COIN) between the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust (ULH), Lincolnshire Community Health Services NHS Trust (LCHS) and Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LPFT) serving over 2000 users at 111 sites spread across the county.
The transformational implementation in late 2016 was delivered by ANSecurity for ULH as a multi-phase project to redesign parts of its core infrastructure to improve the flexibility of its secure remote access and reduce costs.
The project uses a high availability deployment of Pulse Secure ‘Connect Secure’ virtualised appliances that includes a license server to enable the organisations to define additional licenses as either Network Access Control (NAC) or Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connections to ensure future flexibility. The licensing server is based on concurrent users, which allow the COIN to scale its licence requirements to better reflect the shift based working patterns within the NHS. The service based offering also includes a two factor authentication feature that is now available as a smartphone based App to further reduce management overheads associated with handling physical two factor authentication tokens.
“Our legacy solution was temperamental in terms of reliability and had difficulty working with some of our sites and was not liked by our users,” explains Ian Baldam, Deputy Director of Informatics at Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, “The licensing model also meant that it was proving expensive to maintain and grow to meet the needs of our staff.”
Ian Baldam estimates that the new service will generate significant savings in licencing fees alone. The jointly financed service is available to NHS staff across Lincolnshire and provides secure access to administrative and clinical systems such as Datix (incident reporting), Lilie (sexual health), expenses and the employee staff records and network shared drives. The service uses an SSL VPN authenticated by Network Access Control plus local device checking to ensure that users are logging in from devices that have an authorised operating system version along with ensuring each device uses encryption to ensure data security.
“From our point of view, we have a lot more remote workers who need access on the move and the old solution struggled to provide access in a reliable fashion,” explains Dan Dring, Acting Head of IM&T for Lincolnshire Community Health Services NHS Trust.
Dan Dring calculates that the move to the shared model will save LCHS between £30,000 and £40,000 a year in licensing and support costs.
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