Northern Ireland NHS hospital trust deploys ForeScout security

The Northern Health and Social Care Trust (Northern Trust) has selected the ForeScout CounterACT platform to achieve greater visibility and control over the ever-growing number of devices accessing its network.

ForeScout partner Foursys provided consultancy services for the implementation. Northern Trust is one of five health trusts in Northern Ireland. It provides a broad range of health and social care services across ten localities, including two large acute-care hospitals and six non-acute hospitals. Northern Trust provides services for a population of approximately 460,000, and has around 12,000 employees.

Northern Trust needed to gain visibility and control over the devices connecting to its network – including medical, clinical engineering and building management system (BMS) devices. Without this level of visibility, it faced significant risk in terms of ICT network security and governance.

Northern Trust looked for a solution that could secure its 15,000 endpoints across 150 sites that was not dependent on additional equipment or specific software version requirements. It selected ForeScout CounterACT.

Pat Black, ICT network and security manager at Northern Trust, said: “The Internet of Things is upon us, and there is an almost exponential growth in the number of network connected devices, so this is why we arrived at the ForeScout solution.

“With the help of Foursys, CounterACT was easy to deploy, didn’t need a lot of associated hardware to run — even for an organisation of our size — and ticked all the boxes with regards to assessment, policy enforcement and compliance.”

Black said CounterACT was now “an integral part” of the trust’s network infrastructure and security toolset.