How general hospital Jan Portaels ensures healthy digital security

The coronavirus pandemic brought many new rules for the daily operations of AZ Jan Portaels. However, the cybersecurity policy also experienced a major impact: along with the COVID virus, computer viruses were on the rise - a trend that had not escaped the hospital management's notice. Phishing prevention suddenly became a greater priority.

"As a defensive party, you are always one step behind hackers," says Jordy De Schoesitter, IT manager at AZ Jan Portaels. "So we want to keep that lag as small as possible by executing our cybersecurity roadmap as quickly and efficiently as possible. The collaboration with Phished is an important part of that."

However, although AZ Jan Portaels takes cybersecurity very seriously, no special precautions had yet been taken in regard to phishing. "We want to be as prepared as possible against a major hack or data breach," says De Schoesitter, "and of course we don't want to wait for such a situation to happen. (Our) people have been phished in the past - after which we were able to remove them from the network immediately, so the damage was very limited - so a structural solution was definitely worth looking into."

An important function of a hospital is to be unburdened, and this is where Phished came in. "An important argument for us was the automation possibilities," says De Schoesitter. "We no longer lose time setting up large-scale manual campaigns. We can now fully focus on prevention and awareness, knowing that the technical side is fully taken care of."

"Anyone who starts at our hospital receives a comprehensive onboarding about both the general workings of our institution and a basic cybersecurity course - but everything considered, that's so much information that we needed a structured approach that could train our people more regularly. The fact that this is fully automated is a good thing for everyone."

"One of the big worries among our employees was that the training would take up a lot of their time," De Schoesitter tells us, "but those worries soon disappeared. We found a good balance in both the regularity of the training and the simulations, as well as their difficulty. The reactions are almost unanimously positive: they found that it was necessary and they are happy that they are learning something that can also be useful in their private lives."

"In the meantime, our figures have improved significantly, so it helps that you can show people that it really works. That provides extra motivation. Moreover, we have recently been able to see, among other things in some hospitals, that such training is really necessary."

Innovation is alive in the Jan Portaels General Hospital, and cybersecurity is an integral part of that. The ease and automation offered by Phished ensures that phishing prevention is an important part of the digitalisation plans, earlier than planned, helped by recent, topical events.

The unburdening provided by the platform also means that the IT team of AZ Jan Portaels can divide its efforts better, as a result of which digital security will be improved faster and better.