GEHA SELECTS NEVIS NETWORKS FOR IDENTITY-BASED NETWORK ACCESS.

Nevis Networks, Mountain View, Calif. a market leader in identity-based policy enforcement solutions that control network access and secure sensitive resources, has announced that the Government Employees Health Association (GEHA) has deployed its LANenforcer 2024 appliances to meet federally mandated HIPAA compliance requirements and enforce pre- and post-connect access controls to fully secure users on its internal LAN. GEHA's large-scale deployment of LANenforcers extends to nearly 1,600 access switch ports and delivers secure access control for nearly 800 users. GEHA is documenting its entire NAC deployment project with an unbiased technical blog at http://www.bumpinthewire.com.

As the second-largest national health insurance plan serving federal employees and retirees and their families, GEHA operates under strict HIPAA guidelines that require the ability to distinguish between corporate-owned and guest assets seeking admission to the network, as well as control over individual user access to network resources. Given the sensitivity of health insurance data that GEHA handles for over 221,000 health plan members, finding a mature, simple to deploy, and cost-effective NAC solution was mandatory. GEHA evaluated the LANenforcer 2024 appliance at the suggestion of Steve Allen, security manager at DPSciences, a trusted advisor to GEHA and a certified Nevis reseller based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

"Not knowing the identity of every user and what resources they are authorized to access on a network as sensitive as ours was the trigger point for investigating NAC solutions," said Justin Gerharter, senior systems engineer with GEHA. "Ironically, despite all of the hype surrounding NAC, it was surprising how few solutions there are that are mature enough and integrate easily into a large enterprise environment like ours without requiring fundamental change to the network infrastructure or impacting network performance."

GEHA's criterion for a NAC solution quickly narrowed down the field of vendor options. "We realized early on that we needed more functionality than most NAC solution vendors were even talking about," explains Gerharter. "Nevis brought us an integrated NAC solution, with an identity firewall capability for controlling user access to sensitive resources, as well as inline intrusion prevention. It was only the complete integration of these services that could adequately enforce our security policies."

According to Gerharter's www.bumpinthewire.com blog: "When we looked at a NAC solution we tried several times to get a demo of another vendor's solution. We were unable to find anyone to show us a working implementation or even a demo in a lab."

In contrast: "We've confirmed the LANenforcer 2024 's track record and have found the implementation to be very simple," Gerharter said. "Its cost-per-user is exceptional and our deployment confirms complete interoperability with our network infrastructure. The great thing about the solution is that it is vendor agnostic. It doesn't care what switch vendor or firewall vendor we use. It only cares about the traffic sent to or from these devices. The more I learn about the LANenforcer 2024 the happier I am with the decision we made."

"The GEHA experience is highly indicative of our customer base as a whole," said Kevin O'Connor, vice president of sales at Nevis Networks. "Justin's blog is a great independent testament to the holistic LAN Security approach we take to implementing NAC. I would encourage anyone considering a NAC solution to read http://www.bumpinthewire.com first and learn from Justin's experience"

GEHA Deploys Latest Nevis Operating Software

GEHA recently rolled out the Nevis Release 4.0 operating software release that greatly strengthens pre-connect access control for endpoints with a new dissolvable messaging agent. The new operating software also allows GEHA to take advantage of a new policy evaluation tool that enables Gerharter and his IT organization to run "what if" scenarios for policy troubleshooting and planning purposes.

In addition, GEHA is taking advantage of a new posture-check dashboard feature for real time monitoring and troubleshooting purposes and new customized reporting tools that can answer key questions such as "who (by user name) accessed various servers and applications over the last month" to continue satisfying compliance and reporting requirements.

About Nevis Networks

Nevis Networks is a market leader in secure switching and identity-based policy enforcement appliances. The company's LANenforcer product family transparently enforces identity-based policies in real time within the network fabric, tightly controlling who can access a company's network and what resources they are permitted to use. Cross-industry customers, ranging from financial services, healthcare, education and defense contractors deploy Nevis LANenforcers to protect sensitive network resources and assets, and significantly reduce the overall costs and time to resolve security breaches and conduct network audits. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, with additional R&D centers in Pune, India and Beijing, China. http://www.nevisnetworks.com