How Lantum, a Workforce Platform for Healthcare Organizations, Protects Sensitive Data, and Ensures Compliance With Lookout Secure Cloud Access

The Objective — Protect Sensitive Data and Ensure Compliance

U.K.-based Lantum, the pioneer of Connected Scheduling™, unites healthcare providers and their workforces so that they can deliver the best care together. With more than 37,000 clinicians onboarded to its platform, in 2021 Lantum supported over 3,000 healthcare organizations, including nearly 150 COVID-19 vaccination centers, with their staffing needs. This saved the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) more than £30 million.

Lantum works with highly sensitive data. The company required a solution that ensured all of this sensitive data, including employee and clinician records, is protected. The solution must minimize risk of exposure and ensure compliance with several cybersecurity and data standards such as the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 27001 and the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Essentials. Ensuring successful compliance with these regulations is essential to Lantum’s business. Without it, Lantum can’t continue as a supplier to the NHS — a core customer.

Lantum utilizes Google Workspace and enjoys its flexibility. However, there were security concerns about the sensitive data that could be aggregated within Google Drive. It is imperative to minimize the risk of an employee without the right access controls viewing or storing data on Google Drive, and sharing that data outside of an approved group. Lantum wanted visibility over downloads of sensitive data when, for example, an employee has resigned. According to Gary O’Connor, CTO, Lantum: “It’s the things that you don’t know about that you worry about the most.”

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“We use Lookout with exact data matching (EDM) to flag information like social security numbers, names and medical record numbers in our master patient index,” said the hospital’s IT Director. “Our policies are set to encrypt data at rest, remove external collaborators, remove public links and insert a marker PDF file informing users to proactively encrypt data.”

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Solution

O’Connor and Lantum’s compliance officer were planning to recertify the company for ISO 27001 and refresh its adherence to Cyber Essentials. During this process, they decided to implement Lookout Secure Cloud Access, an award-winning cloud access security broker (CASB) solution.

According to O’Connor, “When you go through a process like ISO 27001, you must be able to prove that you have strong data protection controls in place. As Lantum’s business scaled, we needed to automate certain things that previously were acceptable as a smaller business to do manually. If we can’t do what we need to do to maintain ISO 27001 accreditation, we’re not going to get into the conversations we need in order to grow revenue.”

Lookout Secure Cloud Access protects data stored in all cloud and SaaS applications. Whether sharing the data externally with partners, or internally with employees, the solution provides IT with control and visibility to ensure an organization’s data stays protected at all times.

With adaptive access and data security policies combined with advanced analytics, Lookout enables organizations to safeguard data against intentional insider threats, accidental data exfiltration, data leakage from compromised accounts and other advanced internet-based threats without minimizing user productivity.

Working directly with Appurity’s team of cybersecurity consultants and Lookout sales engineers, Lantum experienced a seamless and fast deployment of Lookout Secure Cloud Access — and saw immediate results. The customer quickly quickly implemented policies to restrict unauthorized access and ensure compliance.

According to O’Connor, “One of the things that really helped us was the fact that you could quickly set up the Lookout tenant and easily configure it with Google Workspace — within under an hour. We achieved value really, really quickly, and we’ve been able to build on top of that value over time.

”Lantum has a hybrid work model with most employees spread across the U.K., along with several throughout the U.S. and Eastern Europe. With Lookout, Lantum can see which people are accessing its data and from where. Having visibility into the type of data, where the data is located, and the level of sensitivity gives Lantum a better picture of expected or unexpected behavior patterns and markers.

The start of the war in Ukraine was another driving factor to scale Lantum’s cybersecurity program. Several organizations were identified as critical infrastructure by U.K. government bodies, including the NHS. These identified organizations were required to review their cybersecurity policies due to concerns about external threats. These time-sensitive requirements cascaded down to all of NHS’ suppliers, including Lantum. O’Connor and the compliance team needed to quickly demonstrate how they were dealing with various security scenarios. O’Connor said, “We quickly saw that screw tighten everywhere in our world because of that event. Lookout has helped us deal with more of our cybersecurity matters in a systematic way.”

O’Connor added, “Cloud tools like Google Workspace have blurred the boundaries of how we work — more and more business is being accomplished on our employee’s mobile devices, which increases the risk of inappropriate data usage. Lookout Secure Cloud Access has given us greater visibility and control over our corporate and partner data without disrupting our employees experiencing any disruption in productivity.”

Lookout Secure Cloud Access is one element of the Lookout Cloud Security Platform, which converges security service edge (SSE) and endpoint security to protect users and data wherever they reside. It continuously monitors the risk posture of users and devices to provide dynamic and granular zero-trust access based on the sensitivity level of apps and data, enabling organizations to protect its workers, their devices, apps, and data from unauthorized access as well as from modern day internet-based threats. The platform provides customers the ability to leverage the threat intelligence from mobile endpoints to make more informed decisions for cloud security service.

Built on the Company’s patented technologies, the Lookout Cloud Security Platform combines the following security services: 

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“We use Lookout with exact data matching (EDM) to flag information like social security numbers, names and medical record numbers in our master patient index,” said the hospital’s IT Director. “Our policies are set to encrypt data at rest, remove external collaborators, remove public links and insert a marker PDF file informing users to proactively encrypt data.”

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Results

Lookout Secure Cloud Access has helped Lantum: 

Gain visibility into data, devices, and users 

Ensure continuous monitoring of user and entity behavior analytics and implement advanced data protection controls to help ensure compliance with regulatory requirements 

Protect data stored in Google Workspace apps from misuse and internet-based threats 

Enable employees to securely collaborate in a hybrid work environment

About Appurity

Appurity is a team of cross-platform mobility consultants specialising in assessing security environments and delivering best-in-class mobile and application security solutions. Built for the modern and dispersed workforce, Appurity’s solutions adhere to data protection and cybersecurity schemes and regulations such as Cyber Essentials and ISO. It works with companies to develop and implement impenetrable security strategies that utilize the latest technologies and security frameworks including ZTNA, SSE, CASB and MTD. Its solutions are built to offer unparalleled protection — endpoint to cloud — while improving productivity for users.