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09 Jun 2005

South Essex partnership NHS Trust uses Sophos to secure networks

Staff at one of South Essex NHS Trust's homes
Staff at one of South Essex NHS Trust's homes

South Essex Partnership NHS Trust has deployed Sophos PureMessage and Sophos Anti-Virus to protect its networks from viruses, spam, Trojan horses and spyware. The Trust, which is one of the UK's largest providers of health and social care services, required a highly effective, low-maintenance security solution. The system was provided and installed by Sophos partner, Access IT.

The Trust, which recognised the need for both email gateway and desktop protection, has an extensive IT infrastructure that consists of more than 50 servers and 1,500 workstations, spread over 35 different sites throughout South Essex. In order to deal with this extensive deployment with an IT department consisting of only five support staff and one helpdesk employee, it was vital to have a system with quick and convenient automatic updating capabilities.

As well as installing the system, Sophos partner Access IT also provided on-site training for the Trust, which services the entire 715,000 population of South Essex.

"Like most organisations, the majority of the Trust's employees are not IT experts, so putting an anti-virus solution in place that put zero demands on the average computer user was ideal," said Tony Little, sales and marketing executive, Access IT. "With portions of the Trust's network consisting of 512K connections, it was vital to keep demands on resource requirements to a minimum so as not to cause slowdowns for the end users."

"Sophos's anti-virus solution looked the best on paper and it surpassed expectations when we put it into practice," said Jason Button, IT&T supervisor, South Essex Partnership NHS Trust. "When the software was installed, we caught 400 viruses, including quite dangerous ones such as Netsky-P. All of these viruses were missed by our previous anti-virus software."

About South Essex Partnership NHS Trust

South Essex Partnership NHS Trust is one of the largest NHS providers in the country of health and social care services for people with mental health problems and people with learning disabilities. It has maintained its position as a three star Trust for the last two years. In South Essex, the Trust covers a population of around 715,000, and has an annual income of £81.4 million to deliver services for local people. It also delivers forensic mental health services for the whole of Essex.

About Access IT

Access IT is a leading Internet Integrator based in the heart of Kent, with clients ranging from SMEs to Corporations, Heath Authorities, Local Government and Educational establishments. Access IT has a longstanding business relationship with Sophos, was amongst the first Sophos Certified Partners in the country, and has been nominated for Sophos Reseller of the Year two years running. www.accessit.co.uk.

About Sophos

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.