Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust

Case Study

Andy Franks
Senior Systems Engineer
Shrewsbury

http://www.sath.nhs.uk/

The Background

The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust is the main provider of district general hospital services for half a million people in Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin and mid Wales. We are committed to providing high quality services, and our top priority is to continue to improve safety, effectiveness and patient experience in our hospitals.

How many users/computers do you support and how are they spread out?

The Trust network has 2800 users based on 2 sites. Mostly Win XP, some unix/linux boxes, Citrix/Remote desktop The authentication system is based on LDAP with Active Directory. Web filtering was provided by Websense v6. LDAP / AD Authentication.

What environment is your Smoothwall product running in?

Mostly Win XP, some unix/linux boxes, Citrix/Remote desktop

What type of user authentication do you use?

LDAP / AD

What was the problem that needed to be solved, that required you to look for a new system?

Cost implications of renewal with our current supplier. We wanted a product which represented value for money without compromising on security or usability.

Why did you choose Smoothwall?

Cost, power, ease of use, compatibility, clustering capability for no extra cost.

What has your Smoothwall product enabled you to do?

The most relevant feature is the production of corporate grade reports, but we've also been able to reduce costs and enable end user report gathering, reducing the load on the IT department.

Did we replace a solution from another company? Or who did we compete with?

We previously ran Websense v6. New features are bandwidth throttling, reporting portal, built in proxy, antiviral scanning.

Are you dealing directly with Smoothwall or through one of our Partners?

Direct with Smoothwall.

Do you have any comments about the quality of service you received from Smoothwall or our Partners?

Our pre-sales support experience has been remarkably good. We can't comment post sales as we've just made the decision to purchase the product but if it's the same, we will be very happy.

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