Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Laya Healthcare - Protecting and Securing Data With Smarttech and IBM QRadar SIEM

Laya Healthcare is the second largest provider of private medical insurance here in

Ireland and that means we're protecting over half a million members' lives.

It means that when they take out insurance that they are relying on us

then if they are ill and have to go into hospital Laya Healthcare will look

after their insurance needs during that period. The challenge is the

volume of data that's there in security event logs, when you look at your

firewalls, when you look at your web firewalls, your physical firewalls.

We have web servers which are public-facing which people can

join online and do member-service online. Then you look at all your internal

infrastructure, your data, your virtualisation, there's your hardware,

your network layer, there is an incredible volume of security

information there and how can you tell that this event over here and that

event over there are actually correlated? You can't really and we don't

have the resources to keep throwing people as we get new systems in and

we're installing new systems every quarter so those systems need to be

mapped out and then understood by a security event manager. When Smarttech engaged with

Laya Healthcare for cyber security services, it became obvious that Laya

had invested in best-of-breed business intelligence platforms. These platforms

process large volumes of sensitive data on a daily basis. Securing this data

was a key priority for the leadership team. They wanted a simple solution that

was straightforward to deploy that could crunch large volumes of data and it

could most importantly give real-time visibility into the organisation's

overall risk and security posture. We looked at a range of different

technologies and we used Gartner's Magic Quadrant to look and see

which technologies are particularly strong in this area and

we had always known of Smarttech so we began the conversation with Smarttech because

they were able to provide the QRadar technology. As we see in Smarttech

organizations are wrestling with three core challenges. Firstly, the volume

and the sophistication of malware. Secondly, the complexity of network

architecture, the adoption of cloud and the question of where is it that our

data sits and who's accessing that data. Thirdly, the skills and the lack thereof

for implementation, for management, for monitoring of all of the various

technology platforms so Smarttech and QRadar SIEM solution allow Laya Healthcare

to address all these problems by identifying the more sophisticated cyber

attacks through advanced correlation driving vulnerability management with

QVM and consolidating multiple security feeds, AntiVirus, IPS, apt technologies

into a single pane of glass for real-time Security Intelligence. Smarttech

came on board with us initially that they were really advising us on

the correct type of technology and the correct way to implement it and what

would be the process and that was done from the first days really in terms of

this is what you would do so it wasn't an actual engagement where we were

paying for the advice we were getting but as we moved forward once we evaluated all the

different technologies Smarttech were an obvious choice for us in terms of a

company that had worked with us on that journey to work out exactly what we

needed. Securing today's business environment requires a fresh approach

and organizations need visibility across the entire security timeline. They need

have the ability to assess risk in real time, they need to be able to correlate

all of their security feeds, manage and understand vulnerabilities and

deploy forensics when required and I guess ultimately understand anomalous

behavior within their network. QRadar is a simple solution that delivers all of this

functionality for Laya Healthcare and allows them to concentrate on their core

business

When we started installing IBM QRadar with Smarttech the initial

implementation took about 3 months and these

solutions are not

something you bring in, you turn a switch and all of a sudden it's

magically installed so as you install you begin to see more and more and

you'll understand more and more about your own infrastructure. It takes

time then to go away and remediate something or improve something and

then you go back to QRadar and you say okay we've got that done now. It gave us

was two-fold: at a business level it gave us better visibility of

what was going on within our networks within our infrastructure so that we're

assured we've got the level of protection we want to apply. At a

technical level it gave us tremendous visibility into all of the security

event logs and as with every IT shop there's an

awful lot of security events and it's very difficult to stay on top of it.