Belgian Teaching Hospital and Healthcare Provider Enables Secure Mobile Working with Check Point

CHU Charleroi
The University Hospital Center of Charleroi (CHU Charleroi) operates from a number of locations in the Wallonia region of Belgium. Its hospitals provide surgical, geriatric, medical, psychiatric and rehabilitation services. It is also a teaching hospital and is linked to the national healthcare system.

Healthcare requires a collaborative environment. Increasingly, CHU Charleroi is enabling mobility for its doctors and management, to allow them to work more effectively from any location.

Enable secure, mobile working
As part of its mobility program, CHU Charleroi planned to roll-out 500 smartphones and tablets to medical and management teams. A mix of Android and iOS devices, the hope was that the devices would be easy to use and something employees would also enjoy using.

“We needed to monitor, and to be certain which apps were on the device, but there also needed to be freedom,” says Edwin Urbain, Network & Telecom Team Leader, CHU Charleroi. “It’s important that staff want to use these devices.”

The ICT team wanted to allow staff to add personal applications, but needed the means to authorize, validate and approve quickly. “Ideally this should be automatic,” explains Urbain. “The key issue was ‘does the app send data’?”

Depending on the success of the project, if Urbain’s team could monitor the 500 corporate devices it would then open up mobility to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) users; allowing employees to work from their own mobile device. Again, it would need to monitor BYOD access to suitable applications.

Market-leading threat protection, and simple management
CHU Charleroi has been a Check Point customer since 2013, using Check Point firewall solutions.

“We’re under regular attack, and the Check Point firewalls have always responded well. The solution has been effective,” says Urbain. “We saw Check Point’s mobile protection capabilities as an evolution of this protection.”

Check Point’s SandBlast Mobile is a mobile threat defense solution (MTD), protecting and preventing advanced cyber-attacks from entering devices. It protects against malware, man-in-the-middle attacks over cellular and Wi-Fi networks, OS exploits, and phishing attacks. In addition, the cloud-based dashboard provides real-time threat intelligence and visibility into the type of threats that could impact CHU Charleroi.

“Obviously we reviewed other options, but Check Point was the only product that met our needs,” says Urbain. “SandBlast is the complete product.”

Urbain also adds, “We are happy to work closely together with our Check Point partner, Prodata Systems. Thanks to their extensive knowledge and their great understanding of our needs, they are vital for the implementation and support of the Check Point solutions we use.”

Effective collaboration across a dynamic healthcare environment
Check Point SandBlast Mobile was deployed in late 2017. Initially planned for 500 corporate devices, the project has been an instant success: it has since expanded to a further 215 corporate devices, along with 192 BYOD.

“The main benefit of Check Point SandBlast Mobile is definitely the user interface,” says Urbain. “Tools such as SmartLog and SmartEvent to see, track and act on issues almost in real-time. We can check the source of an attack, and easily view a history.”

CHU Charleroi benefits from a range of functionality through the use of mobile devices. Staff can now video conference (joining live video calls with surgeries, for example), they can view and update medical files remotely, the devices’ camera is used to capture and share details of a patient’s prognosis. It is creating a more agile, collaborative workforce.

“Video conferencing, particularly from a teaching perspective, is hugely important. It allows doctors and trainees to work together wherever the location,” says Urbain. “The mobile space is so dynamic; we expect to add new applications over the next 12 months. But our entire mobile strategy needs to be managed securely and simply, to protect extremely sensitive data and to make it easy for employees to use their smartphones.

We have that control with Check Point SandBlast Mobile.”