Potomac Hospital is a 183-bed community hospital with more than 1,000 employees and 250 medical professionals serving Prince William County, Va. and surrounding communities.

After many attempts to find an easy and effective secure wireless solution, Potomac Hospital acted on the suggestion of reseller Database & LAN Solutions (DBLS) and tested alternatives to its legacy vendors. Tony Davis, manager, network systems for Potomac Hospital, selected SonicWALL after seeing the speed and ease with which DBLS proprietor Jeff Greenspan was able to get the solution up and running.

Jeff Greenspan worked with Tony Davis to install a secure SonicWALL distributed wireless network that provides Internet access for Potomac Hospital patients and their families as well as wireless access for medical personnel using laptops. At the core of network protection is the SonicWALL PRO Series 5060 Unified Threat Management firewall, which are equipped with dynamic threat protection designed to prevent viruses, worms, Trojans and other malware from entering the network. The hospital also uses the devices for two active wide area networks and as secure wireless switches and controllers for 37 SonicWALL SonicPoint secure wireless access points. Potomac has also connected a PRO 2040 appliance at a separate location to serve as a backup Internet link.

"SonicWALL has really made the lives of our small IT staff much easier," said Davis. "For example, when there is a major virus outbreak, my counterparts at other hospitals are working through the night to secure their networks or make repairs, while I am heading home. The medical industry is an entirely different world, and if we make a mistake or our technology fails, it can be bad for a whole lot of people. That's why we trust SonicWALL."

SonicWALL SSL-VPN technology provides easy and secure remote access for physicians and service providers who work from home or from remote offices, including an Australian vendor that regularly uses the secure VPN to review x- rays. Potomac has 200-250 people that access the hospital's network remotely, with nearly 60 individuals at any one time active on the PRO Series IPSec VPN connection.

SonicWALL Continuous Data Protection devices provide backup and recovery in two locations to support the hospital's business continuity and disaster preparedness plans, as well as to help Potomac comply with regulatory requirements and issues such as privacy, documentation and audit trails.

"For Potomac Hospital, SonicWALL was able to fill the gaps in network security and data protection with affordable, high performance solutions," said Jeff Greenspan of DBLS. "SonicWALL solutions have made a positive impact on the productivity of Potomac's seven-person IT staff and have helped to eliminate a variety of concerns, from wireless access security to content filtering and regulatory compliance" - SonicWALL.