Business Problem

All health insurers face a daily challenge of safeguarding the private health information of their members and associates. In addition to serving the best interests of these constituents, insurers are also subject to various regulatory requirements relating to the privacy of personal information.

Two prominent regulatory requirements result from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and requirements of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Both are intended to help secure the private healthcare information of consumers.

HIPAA regulation 164.312(a)(1) Access Controls states that organizations handling private patient information must: “Implement technical policies and procedures for electronic information systems that maintain electronic protected health information to allow access only to those persons or software programs that have been granted access rights …”

In addition to HIPAA regulations, BCBST is also subject to ongoing security and privacy requirements from the CMS. These requirements are independent of HIPAA, but related in that they specify levels of security measures regarding private patient information.

Business Approach

Accomplishing the goal of proactively protecting the private information of members and partners would require a broad effort inside the company, touching the people, processes, and potentially technology that BCBST used to secure and manage the infrastructure. In order to leverage this internal effort and to streamline the process of demonstrating compliance, the BCBST team linked their efforts related to HIPAA and CMS compliance. The team chose to implement a set of security guidelines specified by CMS in a document titled “Acceptable Risk Safeguards.” By meeting this standard of security readiness, BCBST would be able to serve the best interests of their constituent base and demonstrate the appropriate regulatory compliance.

Technology Challenge

BCBST had built a security infrastructure that was comparable with current practices in the healthcare industry, and a substantial element of this protection involved a reliance on traditional enterprise firewalls. This technology provided a means to exclude all but previously approved and documented network traffic. However, application and database attacks that use the allowed protocols cannot be seen by traditional enterprise firewalls. Also, traditional enterprise firewalls do not track the appropriate information to recognize malicious application activity. As a result, BCBST had no means to monitor and alert on malicious traffic that used legitimate protocols.

Technology Approach

BCBST’s technology team kicked off a project intended to provide protection for all aspects of the BCBST web and database infrastructure. The key requirements that the technical team identified for the project were:.

  1. Complete Solution – BCBST needed to find a technology that protected the entire infrastructure. Specifically, any solution would need to cover both the web applications and the associated databases.
  2. Low Infrastructure Impact – Any technology deployed should not impact existing applications or infrastructure elements. Especially important was avoiding delays due to a solution that required changes in existing applications, infrastructure or processes.
  3. Low Operational Impact – Any technology deployed should not impose an excessive burden on the operations team, particularly minimizing ongoing maintenance and avoiding impact on organizational processes.
  4. Deployment Support – It was important to be able to find a turnkey solution to be able to deploy in time to meet the requirements.

Why Imperva?

The BCBST team chose the Imperva On-Premises to address the technology aspects of application and database security. Imperva On-Premises, composed of Imperva WAF Gateway and Data Security solutions, is deployed in the internal and external network monitoring the traffic from protected systems and protecting them from attacks. Imperva addressed each of the four key requirements laid out by the technical evaluation team:

  1. Complete Solution – Imperva On-Premises’ Unified Architecture addresses the complete problem of securing both applications and databases at BCBST.
  2. Low Infrastructure Impact – Imperva On-Premises offered the flexibility of deploying in non-inline mode so that the solution could be quickly tested and deployed in the production network without requiring any changes to existing applications, infrastructure or processes.
  3. Low Operational Impact – Dynamic Profiling automates the process of deploying and maintaining up to date security at BCBST, removing the tuning overhead introduced by other potential solutions.
  4. Deployment Support – Imperva delivered a turnkey solution package that allowed BCBST to implement in time to meet their compliance obligations.

Imperva Solution

Imperva On-Premises is currently protecting BCBST’s entire online presence (www.bcbst.com), which includes portals for members, employees, providers and brokers. Imperva On-Premises is also protecting a variety of internal and external applications as well as database systems from a variety of vendors. BCBST plans to deploy Imperva On-Premises enterprise-wide to protect all web and database servers in the infrastructure.

An important benefit of the Imperva On-Premises deployment architecture has been the flexibility to use inline and non-inline deployment for appropriate stages in the process. Because of this flexibility, BCBST has been able to quickly realize the benefits of Imperva without putting the IT infrastructure at risk.