Transform Medical – Smoothwall Filter Case Study

What’s the background?

Transform is the largest cosmetic surgery company in the UK, with its headquarters in Manchester.

They have 26 clinics and two private hospitals, where Transform’s patients can choose from a range of surgical and nonsurgical procedures.

The company has 450 employees across medical, administration and sales functions.

As the business operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, web access is shared across multiple shift patterns with more than one user per device.

The challenge

According to Senior Systems Engineer, Nick Furnell: “Our previous web filter was unreliable, impacting negatively on day-to-day operations.” “There were occasions when staff couldn’t make necessary changes to patient records.”

“There had also been issues with the use of shopping sites during work hours. Access to online shopping is needed for business purposes, but this had meant that personal shopping was allowed too.”

From a compliance view, there was a need to ensure that confidential information was kept secure, as a data leakage would be unacceptable. Sites such as Google Drive and Dropbox needed to be blocked.

How Smoothwall helped

Smoothwall’s granular web filtering controls allowed Transform to apply different levels of filtering for onsite and on-call staff: “Smoothwall’s SWG has the flexible filtering controls that we need.”

that they had previously experienced. Time quotas were also deployed to allow periods of relaxed browsing.

Transform’s concerns about potential data leakage via online storage sites have been significantly reduced. The IT department has been able to effectively restrict access to services like Dropbox and Google Drive, preventing their misuse.

“Smoothwall really is the best in its class, and the support at all levels – from sales to installation – has been of the highest standard.”