The Southern Health NHS foundation trust has overhauled its security with a security information and event management (SIEM) and content security platform from Trustwave.
A merger of two trusts sparked the decision to design a new consolidated network - previously run by four different service providers - serving thousands of staff operating across more than 150 sites in the south of England.
Southern Health NHS foundation trust is using Trustwave SIEM to collect, analyse and assess security events proactively for rapid identification, prioritisation and response.
Anthony Guethert, head of IT architecture and design authority at the trust, said: "We started using mail and web filtering from Trustwave, so extending this to log and event management was a sensible choice, especially since their portfolio contains complementary technologies and services."
Adam Newman, infrastructure and security architect, and interim security manager, at Southern Health NHS foundation trust, said: "Trustwave offers us a security safety net that helps protect our networks, patients and stakeholders from potential data loss or theft of sensitive clinical or patient records."
Newman added: "It is a core part of our 'defence in depth' strategy allowing us not only to monitor and pre-empt security breaches but also act as a vital source of forensic data should the worst happen."
A key requirement of the new infrastructure was to adhere to UK security guidelines, known as Good Practice Guide 13 (GPG 13), which government organisations must follow if they wish to connect to the UK government's extranet.
The trust also wanted the ability to permit the secure remote working of health workers, allowing them to access the central network from patients' homes or while on the road.
Newman was one of the team of three charged with designing the network and consolidating it into two core data centres in Basingstoke and Havant, as well as three secondary locations.
Key to this was incorporating all the existing 9,000 users and critical apps as well as those hosted on the NHS N3 cloud network, which provides email, accounting, purchasing and the patient administration system to trust employees, said Newman.