Attendo Oy is the largest private provider of care for the elderly in Sweden and Finland, and outsourced health care in Finland. Services include care for people with disabilities, individuals and families, health and dental care. The organization includes 19,000 employees in more than 500 health units in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. The team also proudly promotes women in the organization, with 40 of their 50 leadership positions held by women.

As a private provider of care and health services, Attendo decided to invest in their data center security to better secure customer data, and ensure the operation/business continuity of the organization could run without any disturbance.

In the past few years, Attendo has actively restructured their data center, taking the full responsibility for the security back into the organization. In addition, the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation and laws binding health care organizations raised the need to better address their compliance and security requirements. Attendo invests proactively in high-grade security to protect their customers’ information and their own business. Attendo is also listed on the stock exchange, which presents another reason to protect the servers holding the data with comprehensive protection. The efforts in security are seen as a clear competitive advantage at Attendo. “We take our customers’ data privacy very seriously,” said Päivi Luotola, Head of IT.

"The performance of our VMware environment has improved with Deep Security."

Päivi Lutola,
Head of IT

The VMware platform required a security solution designed to support virtualized environments. Decision makers at Attendo looked at Trend Micro™ Deep Security™, and were convinced that the capabilities offered by the solution would meet their need for a high level of server security.

“Our local partner understands the critical nature of our business and therefore proposed Trend Micro Deep Security for our data center,” said Luotola.

The profound integration of Deep Security™ in the hypervisor level of the VMware platform enables easy deployment and administration. In addition, the interface of Deep Security Manager provides a clear view on the security status of the data center with one glimpse. The testing phase proved to be successful and Attendo realized the great service they would receive from Trend Micro as their trusted security partner. Deep Security became the clear choice.

”We are happy with the collaboration with Trend Micro, and see that the vendor has a strong relationship with local partners.”

”We required our VMware environment to be protected by a solution that would work under the same laws as the platform, and that the maintenance and administration would be straightforward. The original thought was to just purchase basic antimalware software for our servers, but the comprehensive features the Trend Micro Deep Security Enterprise solution offers gives us the chance to achieve our goal of layered protection,” added Luotola.

Attendo began to deploy Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ at the end of 2015. It was most critical to provide the antimalware component to all Microsoft® Windows® servers. In Attendo’s environment, this could be done agentlessly on the VMware platform. Soon after completing the first step of the project, the deployment of intrusion prevention (IPS/IDS) and host firewall features were launched.

Once the security information and event management (SIEM) project was finalized, logs from the servers were reported with the log inspection capability of Deep Security™. The integrity monitoring is a desired feature for Attendo to deploy as it notifies the administrators of any suspicious changes made on the servers, which is likely one detail that the EU Regulation will demand from environments hosting critical information. Attendo intends to use all the capabilities of Deep Security to take full advantage of the solution.

Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ has fulfilled all expectations. The solution has been easy to deploy and the agentless antimalware protection enables Attendo to run security scans without slowing down the environment so administrators can take action whenever they want. “The performance of our VMware environment has improved with Deep Security,” said Luotola.

The daily life of the IT team at Attendo has reached a new level of serenity, and the hours at the office can be used for valuable development instead of putting out fires. It also brings peace of mind to the team to know that with Trend Micro, they can continuously enhance their security to deter any negative media coverage in the future. “It is a clear business advantage that our customers’ data is kept safe and Attendo is kept out of negative headlines,” said Luotola.

The Attendo team is very conscious about the fact that you can never be fully ready when it comes to information security. Constant development is done in the entire environment with the mindset of what it takes to handle critical data in the field of health care. The layered approach to security has already brought good results. Attendo wants to improve the defense of their network and address the vulnerabilities in the environment in more depth. The comprehensive view on the status of security maintains its value also in the future.

”We know that the cost of a breach is much more than any of our investments in security,” concludes Luotola.