Cyber Immune Thin Clients in healthcare

Today’s healthcare environment presents new challenges for personnel and IT infrastructure. Typically, healthcare IT budgets are limited. At the same time, requirements for workstations are low. Staff work with spreadsheets, an internal corporate portal, selected websites, and print documents.

Despite the modest demands on workstation hardware, organizations face a number of other industry-specific challenges.

• Because healthcare organizations deal with sensitive personal information, special care must be taken to ensure the security of its collection, storage and processing.
• As part of the development of a unified state healthcare system, it is necessary to comply with the Russian Ministry of Health’s “Methodological recommendations for equipping medical institutions with computer equipment and software” as well as the requirements of other regulatory documents, including import substitution legislation.

Pilot project objectives

A state-owned company with its own network of healthcare facilities was looking for a solution to organize its employee workstations. There were two key considerations for updating the infrastructure. First, the company needed to reduce the cost of maintaining an outdated and heterogeneous fleet of equipment in multiple locations.

Second, the regional offices did not have a sufficient number of specialists who could combine information security and IT functions.

Additional requirements the customer requested for the solution were:

• connection to virtual machines running Windows;
• ability to add Linux-based work environments in the future;
• work with two monitors;
• forward security tokens to the virtual machine;
• work with local printers;
• audio conferencing capability;
• centralized management system;
• user device hardware platform must be registered with the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade.

After testing several products from Chinese manufacturers, it was decided to reject them. Despite the competitive prices on offer, their functionality did not meet the customer’s requirements: there was no full Russian localization and no centralized management. The company decided to pilot Kaspersky Thin Client.

Solution

A workstation infrastructure based on Kaspersky Thin Client with the ability to centrally manage thin clients and other Kaspersky products was implemented in several of the polyclinic’s branches.

The ability to centrally manage thin clients allows administrators to manage workstations, which reduces the costs of administration and workstation support.

In addition, thin clients are more efficient than personal computers when it comes to equipping workstations. They are smaller, consume less power and have a longer lifespan.

Pre-configured thin clients are installed in branch offices, securely connected to virtual desktops and centrally managed via KSC. Secure updating of all devices is also centralized. The fact that the Kaspersky Thin Client software is included in the unified registry of Russian software, and the hardware platform is included in the register of the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade, means the solution fully complies with all import substitution requirements.

Result

The pilot project in several of the polyclinic chain’s branches showed that the implementation of the thin client infrastructure fully met the requirements. The customer emphasized the economic effect of being able to centrally manage the device fleet. By standardizing devices and eliminating the need for IT staff to travel to branch offices, the time spent on desktop maintenance was significantly reduced.

The cost of protecting workstations from cyberattacks was also reduced, as the Cyber Immune nature of the thin clients eliminated the need to purchase and install antivirus tools.

Based on the results of the pilot, the customer purchased more than 100 Cyber Immune Kaspersky Thin Client nodes as well as the Kaspersky Security Center management system. The management of the chain of clinics plans to expand the implementation of the solution. The geographically distributed architecture will cover medical institutions in three cities, each with 150-200 workstations.