Profile
Industry: Healthcare
Advanced Reimbursement Management, LLC (www.advancedreimbursement.com) is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. Based on the belief that maximum reimbursement can best be achieved through full integration of the technical, clinical, and legal aspects of claims management, the company has developed a family of services to help hospitals convert receivables to cash. These services include Receivables Management, Post Payment Review, Denials Management, Eligibility Services and Clinical Auditing.
"Instantly and transparent to our end-users, our network of 130 users had up-to-date, comprehensive, un-intrusive, enterprise class protection against Web and email threats"
Bobby Miller
Chief Network Engineer
Advanced Reimbursement Management
Comprehensive Network Coverage
Advanced Reimbursement Management Reclaims their Network with NETGEAR® STM Stream Scanning Technology
Background
Bobby Miller, Chief Network Engineer of Advanced Reimbursement Management, is in charge of the design, installation, monitoring and maintenance of WAN and LAN implementations throughout the company. The network consists of 5 T1s with an internal server segment and 130 users in multiple locations who use the network for email and Web browsing. All network traffic enters and exits through a single gateway. There were two issues that Bobby faced when reviewing the company's network security infrastructure. First of all, although each individual desktop had desktop anti-virus installed, there were still many reported incidents of infection by malware - the Zlob Trojan being one such example. The second issue was the fact that their mail server was being overwhelmed with large amounts of spam email every day. This hurt team member productivity and consumed over forty percent of their available network bandwidth. Bobby needed an additional layer of security to provide further protection for the network's Web traffic and a solution to their spam problem.
Problem/Objective
Secure the Network Perimeter With Limited Resources
Identifying what was needed was only half the solution. Advanced Reimbursement Management's IT staff consisted only of a handful of team members and had a set budget to resolve these issues. Since all of Advanced Reimbursement Management's remote offices shared the same Internet gateway, having that layer of protection at the gateway was a logical choice. During his research, Bobby noticed that many solutions would only solve half of his problem. "There were an abundance of anti- spam products, however not many of those offered protection for Web-based threats. Of the ones that did offer both, it seemed as if Web protection was just an afterthought." says Bobby. "What the vendors were trying to sell as Web protection was not much more than URL filtering. The solutions that scanned HTTP and HTTPS Web traffic for viruses and spyware did not provide the coverage or the performance we needed."
Solution
NETGEAR® STM Stream Scanning Technology Provides Complete Coverage
While searching for possible solutions, Bobby learned about the Content Security Gateway (CSG) using NETGEAR® STM Stream Scanning Technology and the low latency advantages of that technology when scanning large volumes of Web traffic. For antispam security, the CSG used a distributed spam analysis architecture, which used an "in the cloud" approach to classify and process spam – this conferred advantages in deployment simplicity and detection accuracy. From what Bobby read, the CSG sounded like a possible candidate to protect Advanced Reimbursement Management's network so he ordered a unit for evaluation. Since the appliance functioned like a transparent Layer 2 switch, installing it at the network gateway was simple and straight forward. Within thirty minutes, the network was being protected by NETGEAR® STM Stream Scanning Technology. "This was one of the most seamless, trouble free installs I've performed. The degree of difficulty was not much greater than installing a switch, which is a big advantage," mentioned Bobby. Logging into the CSG's Web management console, Bobby found that enabling anti-malware and anti-spam protection was as simple as checking a few boxes. "Instantly and transparent to our end-users, our network of 130 users had up-to-date, comprehensive, un-intrusive, enterprise class protection against Web and email threats," says Bobby.
Result
Peace of Mind
Bobby immediately noticed a dramatic decrease in spam emails hitting their mail servers. After a couple of hours he received email notifications from the CSG indicating that multiple rootkit attempts were being detected on inbound Web traffic. "If that rootkit infected our system it would have caused multiple disruptions in our daily productivity," implied Bobby.
Advanced Reimbursement Management has now used the CSG with NETGEAR® STM Stream Scanning Technology for two years now, and Bobby has been extremely happy with the protection and peace of mind the appliance provides the network and its users. Since it was installed, the CSG using NETGEAR® STM Stream Scanning Technology has scanned a total of 28 million Web sites, 150 thousand emails, and has detected and deleted hundreds of viruses, worms, spyware, Trojans, backdoors, and rootkits. There has not been a single malware infection incident since the unit was installed and spam has all but disappeared from user mailboxes. "The CSG has been like a silent guardian looking over our network. It has stopped numerous Webbased malware attacks and the distributed spam analysis has helped unclog our mail boxes from spam email. The NETGEAR® STM Stream Scanning Technology has given us significant return on investment by providing transparent, latency free network Web and email malware scanning."
