Taylor Lehman

Chief Information Security Officer, Wellforce and Tufts Medical Center

Supernova Award Category: 

Digital Safety, Governance, and Privacy

The Organization: 

Tufts Medical Center is the oldest permanent medical facility in New England, and the third oldest in the United States. Its founding institution, the Boston Dispensary, was created in 1796 by American patriots including Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. It is now a premiere research organization and provides critical healthcare services to the Boston community.

 

The medical center also serves as the principal teaching hospital for Tufts University School of Medicine. The medical center cares for patients of all ages and has a full-service pediatric hospital called the Floating Hospital for Children. In addition to providing medical services, Tufts Medical Center also conducts medical and health policy research.

The Problem: 

Patient safety and quality of care is of foremost importance to Taylor Lehmann, CISO of Wellforce and Tufts Medical Center. For Taylor, his most important focus is to deliver on the mission of the organization, which he says is providing “a safe system environment for our patients to receive safe, high-quality care without interruption. Making sure all of the devices, including those that play a direct role in care delivery and safety, are protected at all times”.

 

Tufts Medical Center required a security solution capable of protecting multiple hardware and

software platforms, and industry-specific systems. Additionally, the organization needed to secure endpoints against compromise and lateral intrusion techniques. Liability issues and financial loss arising from data breaches are a critical concern, but protecting the endpoints where patients receive care is vital.

The Solution: 

Taylor identified that endpoints and endpoint security need the most amount of focus if you want to disrupt an attack, even a sophisticated attack. After looking at the endpoint tools his organization was using , and looking at the tools that others use and have had success with, Taylor came to a few conclusions: Signature-based antivirus can’t keep up with emerging attacks we see and antivirus software that needs to be online and networked to receive updates will fail. These facts create issues that prevent these solutions from performing well with attacks and never before seen threats.

Taylor and his team decided that an AI-powered, next-generation antivirus solution capable of protecting from never before seen threats would be the best solution for protecting company and patient data.

The Results: 

Taylor’s team worked with Cylance to deploy CylancePROTECT to a testbed of sixty machines. This took roughly eight hours to package and deploy. Once the initial trial period ended with positive results, CylancePROTECT was rolled out across the environment. By the end of the deployment, CylancePROTECT was present on all Windows and Linux systems. Further, Cylance installations are forthcoming for the Mac OSX systems as well as implementation of Cylance’s EDR solution, CylanceOPTICS, to select machines.

 

“Being deep into a platform, and then having that feature set be the same across platforms, running on a Mac as it runs on Linux as it runs on Windows, helps to ensure we have consistent visibility into protection and uniform response procedures, and that keeps things simple,” Taylor says.

Metrics: 

During its evaluation, Tufts Medical Center’s testing showed that Cylance identified malicious files previously undetected by existing signature-based systems. Further testing revealed a higher overall detection rate of malicious files and malware as well as a general decline in overall malware infections, once the Cylance solutions completed implementation and configuration.

 

Moreover, the process to deploy CylancePROTECT required less engineering time to set up and execute, providing the team with valuable time and increasing their collective ability to focus on patient-focused activities. Deploying and running CylancePROTECT has resulted in no recorded downtime to date. (

The Technology: 

CylancePROTECT and CylanceOPTICS were adopted as the AV standard for the medical center. Cylance ThreatZERO™ services were leveraged to help identify and handle threats.

Disruptive Factor: 

Tufts Medical Center is taking a proactive approach to cyber threats by becoming an early adopter of machine learning based, preventative security solutions. Today’s cyber landscape demands that security teams account for a wide variation of devices and variables in their organizations. Prevention-based security provides assurance the company’s endpoints are adequately protected from known and unknown threats, while giving time back to the security team to focus on value-added activities.

Shining Moment: 

I’m proud that our organization has embraced the early adoption of the latest technologies in order to protect our patients.

About Your Organization

Tufts Medical Center is an exceptional, not-for-profit, 415-bed academic medical center that is home to both a full-service hospital for adults and Floating Hospital for Children. Conveniently located in downtown Boston, the Medical Center is the principal teaching hospital for Tufts University School of Medicine.