The South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLAM) is a London-based NHS trust specializing in mental health. It consists of four campus sites and over 70 community sites, with more than 5,000 employees. Stuart MacLellan is the head of operations for digital service at SLAM, where his team manages thousands of endpoints leveraging private and public cloud infrastructures.

Prior to choosing Trend Micro, MacLellan and his team were constantly challenged by high volumes of malware and viruses on the network, which led to system outages on occasion and ultimately a poor customer experience. In mission-critical environments like hospitals, this kind of impact is unsustainable in the delivery of critical frontline services.

At the same time, SLAM was evolving its infrastructure by adopting cloud services. It was the first NHS trust to migrate to Microsoft® Office 365® and moved to Microsoft^® Azure^® for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the first day of its launch in the UK. MacLellan recognized the need for a cloud-ready product suite to provide unified protection against zero-day and emerging threats across physical and hybrid cloud environments. He also required comprehensive threat detection at the network layer, which could be viewed holistic.

For six years, SLAM has relied on Trend Micro to protect its 5,000 employees and clients using Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Suites, a multi-layered product approach to security that includes OfficeScan™ endpoint solution and InterScan™ Web Security Virtual Appliance. That superior performance and ability to root out threats gave MacLellan the confidence he needed to deepen the partnership with Trend Micro to include enhanced cloud and network security.

SLAM enhanced its protection with Trend Micro™ Deep Security™, Deep Discovery™ and Cloud App Security to secure their hybrid cloud data center, network, and cloud application layer.

"We’re a small team and run security as a linear layer across all our departments, so ease-of-use was essential. With Deep Security you get a holistic view from endpoint to servers and from cloud to network inspection, which was exactly what we needed."

Stuart MacLellan,
Head of Operations for Digital Service
at SLAM

Deep Security is Trend Micro’s flagship data center security platform, offering unparalleled protection for physical and hybrid cloud environments, all from a single console. Deep Security is optimized for many of the most popular cloud platforms on the market, including Microsoft Azure.

It offered SLAM:

• An “as-a-service” delivery model with consumption-based billing available through the AWS Marketplace
• Host-based intrusion prevention system (IPS) that scales with your cloud to offer continuous protection
• Automatic policy creation and management to ensure workloads are never left unprotected
• Full integration with the Azure Security Center to monitor workloads and provide security alerts through the Azure portal
• Automated virtual patching
• The ability to apply layered security controls such as integrity monitoring, intrusion prevention, content filtering, and behavioral analysis, to the right place at the right time
• Network level (intrusion detection system/IPS) and file integrity monitoring (FIM) to detect and prevent threats
• Accelerated compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and more, thanks to ongoing audit reports and maximum protection

Deep Discovery is Trend Micro’s award-winning advanced threat detection tool. Powered by XGen™ security, it’s designed to monitor all ports and over 105 different network protocols. This allows you to discover advanced threats and targeted attacks moving in and out of the network and laterally across it.

Cloud App Security offers comprehensive protection in Office 365 environments, using sandbox analysis to spot and block ransomware, business email compromise (BEC), and other advanced threats. Over the past two years it has stopped over six million threats not spotted by Microsoft.

SLAM has already seen a range of benefits resulting from its decision to deepen its investment with Trend Micro. MacLellan was particularly impressed by the ability of Deep Security to offer management capabilities from a single pane of glass.

“We’re a small team and run security as a linear layer across all our departments, so ease-of-use was essential. With Deep Security you get a holistic view from endpoint to servers and from cloud to network inspection, which was exactly what we needed,” MacLellan explains. “Although we added more protection to our organization through the various suites, the centralized pane of glass Trend Micro offers hasn’t added any management overheads. It’s more efficient than having four different vendors in place.”

What’s more, Deep Security kept the organization safe from WannaCry while SLAM’s counterparts in the wider NHS were less fortunate. An estimated 19,000 operations and appointments were cancelled as a result of the WannaCry ransomware attack in May 2017.

“We had protection through virtual patching and got assurance through talking to Trend Micro support. It was a very controlled and managed experience for SLAM,” says MacLellan.

That protection has been matched by Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™ Inspector and its ability to hunt down threats at the network layer, as well as Cloud App Security, which blocks malware targeting SLAM’s Office 365 platform.

Most importantly, having an effective, optimized layer of security in place has helped SLAM accelerate its adoption of cloud services to become a more agile and efficient organization. This has generated significant cost savings through improved capacity management, whilst driving a shift from being “a reactive IT department to a proactive, consultative department that is working to make the business better.”

"Although we added more protection to our organization through the various suites, the centralized pane of glass Trend Micro offers hasn’t added any management overheads. It’s more efficient than having four different vendors in place."

Stuart MacLellan,
Head of Operations for Digital Service
at SLAM

With Trend Micro providing peace of mind to the IT team, they now have the time to look at more strategic plans, which will further help to reduce cyber risk. Improving incident response is high on the list, especially in light of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), says MacLellan.