Apria Healthcare provides at-home clinical services to its patients across the United States. Employing more than 8,000 healthcare providers, Apria is at the forefront of a growing movement to take healthcare out of hospitals and into the homes of patients.
The Story
Supporting a Distributed Workforce Without Compromising on Security
Supporting a distributed workforce comes with its own security responsibilities—something Apria Healthcare knows well. Most of Apria’s team members are geographically dispersed, using laptops and other mobile devices. While this provides efficiencies and allows Apria to provide the highest level of in-home healthcare services, it also creates potential vulnerabilities.
The IT team recognized that precautionary security measures were required. Specifically, they wanted a solution that could mitigate the potential risk of exposed data, extend their visibility to include remote devices, and protect the personal health information of patients to avoid a healthcare data breach.
Security Needs
Improved Patient
Care
Secures Sensitive
Information
Track, Manage, and Report
IT Assests
"Absolute Secure Endpoint is the number one priority for our CIO. I can't verbalize how important this is to my company and how much more effective we've become at securing our healthcare data."
JANET HUNT
SENIOR DIRECTOR, IT QUALITY AND SUPPORT SERVICES
APRIA HEALTHCARE
The Solutions
How They Did It
Providing Visibility Across the Device Fleet
Apria selected Absolute Secure Endpoint to solve its endpoint security challenges. The reliable two-way connection to each device provided value to the organization right away. Once Absolute Secure Endpoint was activated, the IT team had visibility across all of their devices. “Each of our devices is tied to an individual,” said Janet Hunt, Senior Director, IT Quality and Support Services, at Apria. “With Absolute Secure Endpoint, we can establish groups that we categorize by employee, location, and function.”
Consistently Delivering High Level of Security
To consistently deliver a high level of security, new devices are activated at the factory before they are shipped. “When we purchase new hardware through our vendor, the first thing we do is load Absolute Secure Endpoint onto the devices,” said Ms. Hunt. “If any details change, like a username or location, we receive an alert so we can investigate further and take prompt action by either freezing or wiping the device as required.”
Keeping in Compliance with HIPAA
Apria is now confident in its ability to see and control all of its devices and secure sensitive information, keeping them in compliance with HIPAA and other health regulations. They can track and report on inventory, device location, and usage—no matter where the device is located.
The Results
Improving Patient Care While Maintaining Security and Compliance
Absolute Secure Endpoint also supports Apria's adoption of new technology in its ongoing effort to improve the way they serve its patients. The company recently deployed Microsoft Surface tablets to their respiratory therapists. Through these devices, therapists can access critical patient data remotely for a faster cycle of care. "Absolute helps us retain our position as a leader in the marketplace, rather than a follower."
For Apria, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Provides improved visibility of all of its endpoints
- Allows Apria to confidently track and report on inventory, device location, and activity
- Aids achievement of HIPAA compliance by mitigating the risk of exposed data
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
Like what you're hearing?
We’d love to show you how Absolute can secure and empower your organization.
Looking for more information? Join a product overview webinar
Secure Endpoint
Mitigating Zero-Day Threats in a Complex Cybersecurity LandscapeLive Webinar - Sept 17, 2024 | 9AM PT
Secure Access
Leveraging AI to Protect Against Modern Cybersecurity ThreatsLive Webinar - Oct 1, 2024 | 9AM PT
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