The Organization
This U.S.-based, large healthcare insurer serves more than 550,000 individuals in 13 counties. The company’s mission is to provide integrated health care services and products to improve the quality, accessibility and affordability of healthcare.

The Challenge
The healthcare insurer needed to protect its laptops from loss and theft to comply with HIPAA regulations. A past FDE solution was only partially deployed, while Safend’s Data Protection Suite was fully deployed to over 98% of the organization’s endpoints. A large FDE deployment project that could take up to a year was not an acceptable option for the organization. The insurer needed to deploy a solution quickly. With a mixed environment in dozens of locations, a new deployment requiring on site presence or preparation would have been especially challenging for the insurer. Dispatching IT specialists to existing computers, as well as retrieving machines from the field and upgrading them in the lab, proved equally challenging operationally and financially. A quick review of existing FDE deployments by peers discovered partial support for Windows 7, long deployment cycles, and partial coverage once done. With little personnel to spare and less time, the insurer had a challenge on its hands.

The Solution
The insurer was advised by reseller JCS Technologies to buy and enable hard disk licenses on the Safend clients already deployed for port control and removable storage encryption. Already familiar with Safend products, primarily its port/device control solution, the insurer looked to Safend to deploy its Data Protection Suite in order to protect and secure sensitive customer data from internal and external threats.

The Safend Data Protection Suite delivers a comprehensive Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) solution and protects sensitive data on endpoints including port control, removable storage encryption, hard disk encryption, content discovery and content inspection. The insurer specifically selected Safend Encryptor, the hard disk encryption component of the Safend Data Protection Suite.

The Results
Simply enabling a license on existing agents, and applying a central encryption policy – even for endpoints already encrypted with FDE – was done seamlessly by the existing staff, without any machine being called back from the field or any IT specialist dispatched to a remote location. The deployment was over in less than a month with little to no overhead.

Safend Encryptor utilizes Total Data Encryption technology that automatically encrypts all data files, while avoiding unnecessary encryption of the operating system and program files. This innovative concept minimizes the risk of operating system failure, and has a negligible performance impact. Leveraging this unique encryption technology, Safend Encryptor provides transparent hard disk encryption. As a result, Safend Encryptor was able to seamlessly protect the insurer’s data, without changing any of their existing end-user or helpdesk workflows.

In Conclusion
The insurer deployed a Hard Disk Encryption solution to protect its laptops and desktops, without any staff overhead, and without any of the regular challenges associated with this kind of exercise (endpoint preparation, long offline decryption and encryption processes, new processes for helpdesk and users). The close panning and good advice from close advisor and reseller JCS allowed the insurer to deploy HDE in a record time, with little impact and very quick time to full HIPAA compliance on laptop loss and theft.