King’s College Hospital uses Netwrix Auditor to secure ICT network

Netwrix Auditor is helping King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London to improve the security and compliance of its main Microsoft Windows server-based network, which manages the tasks of authenticating and authorising its 10,000-plus users, checking passwords, enforcing security policies for all its computers and installing and updating software.

King’s is one of the UK’s leading NHS Foundation Trusts and one of London's largest teaching hospitals. Its reputation as a world-class hospital was illustrated recently by its starring role in Channel 4’s 24 Hours in A&E, as well as appearances in other documentaries including Hospital Heroes, Emergency in the Womb, The Hospital and The Operation: Surgery Live.

Like all NHS hospitals, King’s front-line work has to be supported by robust, secure, and compliant back-office ICT systems and the Trust recognised that it was a massive challenge to manually monitor the thousands of daily changes on its main ICT infrastructure.

The Trust decided it needed an automated product to audit all privileged user activity and changes, for both security and compliance. After evaluating the options it chose Netwrix Auditor, which now provides King’s ICT Operations Team Leader, David Sewoke, with automated daily change reports and sends real-time red alerts to his mobile phone if any of the Trust’s 50 systems administrators changes a user’s access rights to information.

“It’s improved the security of the network and I now have full visibility of what happens,” David Sewoke said. “I now know exactly who is making changes, when, and why.”

David said Netwrix has also helped to change people’s behaviour. “Now that the staff is aware that everything they do is being audited, there are fewer security risks,” Sewoke said. “People don’t try to make changes such as adding a user as a domain administrator and then later on removing them. Now we can see how far trusted IT administrators are going with their rights on the network.”

Based on this success, King’s plans to extend its use of Netwrix to its EMC-based storage area network (SAN) server environment. At that point, Netwrix Auditor will be monitoring the Trust’s entire IT infrastructure.

“It will cover the whole campus and be on everything; all the servers with full domain coverage,” said David Sewoke. “I’m very pleased with the decision to bring Netwrix into the King’s network. I would give Netwrix 10 out of 10. It meets every single requirement we wanted from it.”