Novell Takes Care of Enterprise Access Management So Florida Hospital Can Take Care of Patients

Novell, Inc., the leading provider of Net business solutions, is helping one of the nation's busiest healthcare facilities, Florida Hospital, cut administration costs, tighten network security and give employees single sign-on to a myriad of systems through a comprehensive access management solution. Florida Hospital, whose staff of 13,000 cares for more than one million people each year, is using Novell® Secure Access™ to simplify and centralize identity management and access control across a wide range of platforms and applications, from large mainframes to specialized healthcare applications. Rather than remembering dozens of user IDs and passwords, Florida Hospital employees can log into the network once and securely gain access to many of the platforms, applications and databases they need to do their jobs. This simplified, more secure access also significantly reduces administration costs and is helping Florida Hospital prepare for and meet government privacy regulations, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Florida Hospital operates seven hospitals and 12 walk-in clinics throughout central Florida, with a mission to assist in restoring and promoting the health and quality of life of its patients. The hospital's IT infrastructure plays a very important role in that mission; but that infrastructure was becoming extremely complex, supporting a number of platforms, such as mainframes, UNIX* systems, NetWare® and Windows NT*, as well as a wide range of applications, from file and print services to healthcare applications like Lanier and Ansos. This complexity left users juggling too many passwords and user IDs, which posed a security vulnerability, and burdened the help desk, raising administration costs. In order to maintain its focus on patient care, rather than its network, Florida Hospital turned to Novell and Net business solutions.

"Novell has helped Florida Hospital take a host of applications and platforms and make them work together as one Net," said Stephen Lynch, project manager for Florida Hospital. "Now users can authenticate to many of the systems they need with a single log in, rather than handling several different user IDs and passwords. Obviously this simplifies our network, making it more user friendly, and it boosts security by reducing bad password-management practices ¾ like writing them on sticky notes.

"Novell's access management solution is also a real benefit on the backend," Lynch said. "The ease of implementation has helped us move towards our goal of managing one central store of authentication information rather than many systems with similar, though disconnected, data. Giving users one synchronized password will dramatically cut the time administrators need to spend resetting lost or forgotten passwords. In short, this solution has helped Florida Hospital meet its business goals by significantly lowering our administration costs, improving our end-user experience and serving as an enabler to meet many of the provisions outlined in HIPAA."

Novell Secure Access
The solution deployed at Florida Hospital is based on Novell Secure Access, an integrated suite which solves the challenge of enterprise access management. Traditional security solutions draw upon a variety of products, which often have their own identity stores and security policies. Maintaining these multiple identity stores and security policies introduces significant security vulnerabilities, increases administration and support costs, and reduces the quality of the end-user experience. Additionally, such solutions don't provide a simple, efficient mechanism for enforcing a consistent access control and security policy for an ever-changing universe of employees, customers and partners. Novell Secure Access eliminates these barriers by delivering a solution that unifies diverse functions such as Web access, single sign-on, firewalls, biometric authentication and many others.

"Novell Secure Access gave Florida Hospital the tools it needed to reduce the complexity of its network and therefore focus not on IT but on providing patients with the best possible care," said Gabriel Waters, director of security strategy for Novell. "That's really the focus of Novell's Net business solutions in the healthcare market and across all industries: simplify the complexities of business on the Net, so customers can lower costs, take advantage of new opportunities and concentrate on their business goals."

For more information about Novell Secure Access, go to www.novell.com/products/secureaccess .