Securing Your Web World: The L&D Hospital Story

Luton and Dunstable Hospital (L&D) in Luton, UK, is a medium-sized hospital that has 550 inpatient beds and provides medical and surgical services for more than 300,000 people. IT’s role at L&D includes protecting the privacy of staff and patients, requiring up-to-date information regarding data vulnerabilities on the hospital’s network. Spurred by sensitivity regarding data security in the UK National Health Service (NHS), L&D undertook an information audit of the hospital’s IT policies relating to data security. The objective was to establish best practices for monitoring and assessing data vulnerabilities and deploying a comprehensive data leak prevention solution.

In this presentation, Pat Aspell, L&D’s Information Technology Strategic Development Lead, will discuss how she and her staff worked with a technology provider partner to identify sensitive data that should be protected and then, once data types and combinations were specified, to deploy tools to automatically monitor the sensitive data on a designated portion of the network. Ms. Aspell will describe how L&D developed a five-year plan with data security underpinning all of its services and successfully addressing two critical challenges: Implementing a tool for assessing existing network data vulnerabilities; and identifying a means to enforce evolving data security policies.