Case Study: AZ Sint-Jan Hospital

Large Public Hospital Chooses Impero for Securing External Vendor Access and Data Protection

With 800 years of experience, three campuses and over 1200 beds, AZ Sint-Jan is one of the largest public hospitals in West Flanders. The IT department consists of 45 people. Bram Vermeulen, Team Coach, told us about the challenges they were facing and why AZ Sint-Jan recently chose Impero to be their remote control solution.

The Challenge

AZ Sint-Jan has many external vendors that need to access its servers. Over time, many ways of connection have been established and many different remote control tools have been used by these organizations to carry out maintenance and support . AZ Sint-Jan urgently needed to consolidate to one type of connection method and one remote control tool. Consolidating to a single tool makes AZ Sint-Jan more secure, streamlines support and reduces problem resolution time. In a 24/7 environment such as a hospital, nothing could be more important than keeping critical systems up and running at all times.

The security of data has never been more crucial. With the increase of cyber-crime and with new EU data protection laws, AZ Sint-Jan needs to know who is logging into which of their servers, at what moment, and what is going on during these sessions.

The Solution

By offering external vendors the application through the Citrix XEN App and granting vendor access with multi-factor authentication, via a NetScaler portal, AZ Sint-Jan can now consolidate to the use of one secure method, Impero Connect. External vendors are happy not to have to install any software on their side and can carry out their work even when they are not in the office.

Thanks to Impero, AZ Sint-Jan now has logs of all remote sessions on their servers and can even record these sessions when necessary — for example, if they suspect that their servers are being misused. These sessions can be monitored and recordings can be used in case of a security breach or as proof of best practice during an audit.

Inside AZ Sint-Jan’s organization, system administrators can also connect directly to servers using Impero if they have the correct credentials and user permissions. These sessions can also be logged in accordance with data protection compliance.

AZ Sint-Jan authenticates user access and configures user rights with Impero’s Security Server. Granular rights management limits user access to specific types of remote control activities. For example, users can be granted or denied permission to conduct file transfers or limited to viewing remote monitors.

Why They Chose Impero

“We now have full control over who is accessing our servers, specify what they can do, log and record their sessions — all this without exposing our servers to the internet”, Mr. Vermeulen concluded.