California Hospital Conquers Network Security Alert Fatigue

By Brent Gilroy, Contributing Writer

Torrance Memorial Medical Center employs a subscription security monitoring service to analyze 19 million network intrusion events and accurately distinguish true threats from noise.

Across the healthcare industry, IT staffs struggle to keep up with waves of physicians aligning with hospitals. New computers and their users must be cleared to access various parts of a network, and there is a constant struggle to address concerns about regulatory compliance and related data security. The last thing anyone needs is a flood of confusing and largely irrelevant security events that prevent IT managers from focusing on real threats.

This is a challenge Todd Felker, infrastructure and security architect at Southern California’s Torrance Memorial Medical Center (a 401-bed general medical and surgical facility), knows all too well. In the spring of 2013, Felker’s team labored to manage the day-to-day burden of adding users while also dealing with an average of 19 million security events per day generated from their Palo Alto Networks firewall with its intrusion detection and advanced threat detection capabilities.