Christopher Frenz is the Associate Vice President of Infrastructure Security at Interfaith Medical Center (IMC) and has been with the company since 2013.

Interfaith is a multi-site healthcare system located in Central Brooklyn. The 287-bed non-profit teaching hospital and its network of ambulatory care clinics treat over 250,000 patients every year.

Chris Corde, Senior Director of Security Product Management, had the chance to talk with Christopher about his journey with the VMware NSX portfolio.

 

Transforming Security in Healthcare

Interfaith Medical Center, like many companies in the healthcare industry, is embracing new technology in the form of electronic health records (EHR) systems. The hospital also has an online portal that allows patients to view information about their treatment and prescriptions and take a more active role in their own care.

While IMC began considering VMware NSX for compliance reasons, they discovered the many benefits micro-segmentation brought to their increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

On top of what IMC implemented with micro-segmentation, they also deployed VMware AppDefense, a product that leverages the VMware ESX hypervisor to build a compute least-privilege security model for applications. AppDefense manages the intended state of an application, then uses the ESX hypervisor to detect and control deviations from that intended state. Rather than chasing potential “bad” behaviors, AppDefense focuses on ensuring workloads are doing what they should be doing. When a threat is detected, AppDefense detects it and responds automatically.

Christopher ran the product through a full Red Team security validation, “We actually installed AppDefense on a server that was running an intentionally vulnerable web application and attempted to do OS command injection attacks. We found that before we had AppDefense in place, these attacks worked with no problems. When we put AppDefense on the same system, AppDefense picked up that the application we were trying to launch was not a pre-approved application in our AppDefense profile, and actually blocked the application from running. It was very interesting to see and it’s something that adds another layer of protection to what micro-segmentation already does.”

Listen to the podcast to learn more from Christopher Frenz about how Interfaith is using VMware NSX and VMware AppDefense to improve its business and support its security goals. Then explore the case study on how Interfaith Medical Center is elevating its security posture and protecting patient data with VMware NSX.

 

Additional Assets

During the podcast, we mention the introduction of AppDefense at VMworld 2017. You can listen to the breakout session titled “Introducing VMware’s Transformative Data Center Endpoint Security Solution” that Christopher participated in here.

Christopher also participated in a VMworld 2018 session, “Introduction to NSX Data Center for Security.” You can view that session here.

Christopher is a project leader in the OWASP Secure Medical Device Deployment Standard.

To learn more about VMware AppDefense, visit www.vmware.com/appdefense.

 

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