Baptist Health South Florida Deploys Centrify's Solution to Improve User Management and Meet HIPAA Compliance


Region's Largest Healthcare System Maintains Regulatory Compliance; Secures Access for UNIX/Linux Platforms; Strengthens Centralized Management, Auditing and Reporting with Centrify

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Centrify Corporation, the leading provider of security and compliance solutions that centrally control, secure and audit access to cross-platform systems, mobile devices and applications using Active Directory, today announced that Baptist Health South Florida has deployed its Centrify Suite for centralizing user management as well as improving password and access management policies for all facilities within their regional network.

Baptist Health South Florida is the largest not-for-profit healthcare organization in the South Florida region, with a network of services extending throughout Florida's Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe Counties. Baptist Health includes seven hospitals and more than two dozen outpatient/diagnostic and urgent care facilities. In addition, its International Center is one of the largest hospital-based international programs in America, with more than 12,000 patients a year from primarily Latin America and the Caribbean. The organization operates a heterogeneous data center with Linux systems and several varieties of UNIX, with more than 50 percent of the servers handling critical production tasks.

"All our compliance efforts have driven us to adopt centralized management, auditing and reporting tools," said Jorge Escala, Systems Engineer for Baptist Health South Florida. "With Centrify we are better able to obtain broad support for our UNIX and Linux platforms, something we were not able to do before. We implemented Centrify's solution easily, without modifying our Active Directory schema, and now we enforce password policies much more easily across our many platforms."

Prior to deploying Centrify, Escala said the healthcare system struggled to meet security and compliance requirements using locally stored "/etc/passwd" files which resulted in password policies for privileged users that were unmanageable and difficult to audit. However, using the Centrify Suite, Baptist Health's IT security department now manages authentication and authorization from a central location using the Active Directory tools that they are familiar with and had already deployed. Now, their auditors review access and user activity from a single reporting tool using Centrify. The Centrify solution also makes it possible to automate password aging and provide detailed auditing of user sessions that was not possible without Centrify.

The organization considered other commercial Active Directory Bridge and open source solutions, as well as other privileged identity management solutions, but found that they were lacking in centralized user management and password policy management, and did not offer the breadth of platform support required at Baptist Health South Florida when compared with Centrify.

Escala added, "Another outstanding feature with Centrify's solution is Single Sign-On which is very important for our department and our users. It makes enforcing password policies much easier, and makes life for our users easier too. With Centrify in place, users are far less resistant of our security initiatives. Also, Centrify has one of the best support teams in the industry."

"Baptist Health South Florida is committed to maintaining the highest level of healthcare standards throughout their network, and we are happy to provide support for their IT security and HIPAA compliance efforts with centralized management, password protection and authorization capabilities," said Gary Taggart, Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Centrify . "Centrify provides this important customer with a more flexible, reliable and stable system for managing their security efforts, and maintaining and reporting on compliance. Organizations across all vertical markets continue to select Centrify to manage security and compliance within their heterogeneous environments, and provide easy integration into their Active Directory infrastructure."

Centrify has broad acceptance throughout healthcare providers for its reliable identity consolidation and privileged access management solutions that addresses HIPAA compliance requirements for UNIX and Linux systems. It also offers an advanced set of capabilities for integrating and managing Macs and mobile devices with existing infrastructure to reduce costs and improve security.

About the Centrify Suite

The Centrify Suite lets organizations centrally control, secure and audit access to cross-platform systems, mobile devices and applications by leveraging an infrastructure they already own - Microsoft Active Directory. Built on an integrated architecture, the Centrify Suite strengthens security, enhances regulatory compliance initiatives, and reduces IT expense and complexity. The Centrify Suite - consisting of DirectControl DirectAuthorize, DirectAudit , DirectSecure and DirectManage - delivers secure authentication and single sign-on, role-based access control, mobile security management, privileged identity management, user-level auditing for Windows and UNIX systems, server isolation, and encryption of data-in-motion for the industry's broadest set of heterogeneous systems, mobile devices and applications.

About Baptist Health South Florida

Baptist Health South Florida is the largest faith-based, not-for-profit healthcare organization in the South Florida region. It includes Baptist Hospital, Baptist Children's Hospital, Baptist Cardiac & Vascular Institute, South Miami Hospital, Homestead Hospital, Doctors Hospital, West Kendall Baptist Hospital, Mariners Hospital and Baptist Outpatient Services. Baptist Health Foundation, the organization's fundraising arm, supports services at all hospitals and facilities affiliated with Baptist Health. For more information, visit BaptistHealth.net and connect with Baptist Health South Florida on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. http://www.baptisthealth.net/en/Pages/home.aspx

About Centrify

Centrify delivers integrated software and cloud-based solutions that centrally control, secure and audit access to cross-platform systems, mobile devices and applications by leveraging the infrastructure organizations already own - Microsoft Active Directory. From the data center and into the cloud, more than 4,000 organizations, including 40 percent of the Fortune 50 and more than 60 Federal agencies, rely on Centrify's identity consolidation and privilege management solutions to reduce IT expenses, strengthen security and meet compliance requirements. For more information about Centrify and its solutions, call +1 (408) 542-7500 or visit http://www.centrify.com/.

Centrify, DirectAudit, DirectControl and DirectSecure are registered trademarks and DirectAuthorize and DirectManage are trademarks of Centrify Corporation in the United States and other countries.

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