Sound Physicians tackles the challenges of a fragmented U.S. healthcare system by partnering with hospitals to drive change, overcome challenges, and improve patient outcomes. With more than 3,000 professionals, they are a physician-funded and led organization that provides services across the acute episode of care — from emergency medicine, critical care, hospital medicine, telemedicine, and physician advisory services.
The Story
Keeping Sensitive Patient Data Safe and Compliant
Sound Physicians operates medical clinics across the U.S. and employs healthcare workers in various other medical settings, including hospitals. With a small, centralized IT team responsible for managing more than 1,700 devices with a vast amount of protected health information (PHI) stored on them, asset management was a significant challenge. For improved visibility and control over remote endpoints that routinely handle sensitive patient data protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sound Physicians turned to Absolute Secure Endpoint.
Security Challenges
Device
Visibility
Date
Protection
Device
Recovery
"Absolute Secure Endpoint gives us a single source of truth. It gives us a footprint on every device; we implement it on every endpoint before it leaves our office, so we can find them, no matter where they go."
JASON SMITH
IT SECURITY SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR
SOUND PHYSICIANS
The Solutions
How They Did It
Increased Visibility Across Entire Device Fleet
While securing and managing devices was already a challenge, the complexity increased exponentially when the pandemic hit, and healthcare workers began working from home. Leveraging Absolute Secure Endpoint, Sound Physicians gained an always-on digital tether to every device, enabling them to track all devices and freeze or even wipe them when needed.
Geolocation Capabilities Ensures Devices and Data Are Protected
With employees continually handling a vast amount of PHI, the ability to see and manage devices was critical. The company is able to use the geolocation and geofencing capabilities of Absolute Secure Endpoint to ensure that any device that travels outside of the U.S. immediately gets flagged. Sound Physicians is also working toward its HITRUST certification, and insights within the Absolute console provide them with the information they need easily and quickly.
The Results
Improved Asset Management Helps Support IT Teams
The dashboard information Absolute Secure Endpoint provides has also been helpful for internal conversations, enabling executives to easily see if a device is encrypted and up to date. It also supports IT in the case of employee turnover; if someone leaves the organization, IT can freeze the device to encourage its return.
For Sound Physicians, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Provides an always-on digital tether to every device, enabling them to track, freeze, or wipe them
- Ensures that any device that travels outside of the U.S. immediately gets flagged with Absolute’s geolocation and geofencing capabilities
- Aids Sound Physicians in HITRUST certification efforts
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
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