Healthdirect Australia, a public healthcare company that primarily provides free services on behalf of the Australian national government, has chosen Tenable Network Security to secure its cloud environment.

The healthcare provider has selected SecurityCenter Continuous View (SecurityCenter CV) to improve security visibility and ensure compliance across its 100% Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment.

In 2012, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) passed a government mandate requiring all federal services to comply with stringent security standards in the Australian Government Information Security Manual (ISM), requiring the Healthdirect IT security team to rethink its security approach, the company says.

“As a business that conducts a majority of our work with the federal government, we knew that our bottom line would be directly impacted if we weren't able to meet the demanding compliance requirements put in place by the ASD,” says Bruce Haefele, Healthdirect Australia chief architect.

“After making the strategic decision to move our entire infrastructure into an AWS cloud environment, we needed to partner with a provider that shared our extreme focus on security. Tenable helps us ensure our security posture is manageable and provides us with complete visibility into our network,” he says.

Healthdirect's security program serves as a model for other public health care companies as well as federal agencies looking to adopt agile cloud infrastructures. With continuous network monitoring from Tenable's SecurityCenter CV, Healthdirect was able to implement necessary security controls, gain immediate visibility into any unpatched or at-risk systems and remediate threats within the required two-day time limit, the company says.

SecurityCenter CV also allowed Healthdirect to assess more than 300 virtual machines within corporate and consumer environments each night, and report on the effectiveness of the security program to business-level executives and the board.

“Our hope is to create a community dedicated to improving cloud security where our solution serves as a stepping stone for organisations looking to automate their systems,” says Haefele.

“It is possible to put secure workloads into the public cloud environment without compromising sensitive patient data if you invest in a comprehensive cybersecurity solution upfront,” he says.

With SecurityCenter CV, Tenable is defining a new market for security products that provides a holistic view to monitoring security well-being. Tenable's SecurityCenter CV won Frost - Sullivan's 2015 Technology Innovation Award for integrating perimeter defences, analytics, reporting, and active and passive vulnerability assessments.