CASE STUDY
Major Dental Support Organization
Enjoys Enhanced Protection with a
Lowered Total Cost of Ownership
Heartland Dental is the largest dental support organization in the United States, providing
comprehensive, nonclinical administrative, accounting, and marketing services to
dental offices nationwide. The company supports over 1,000 dentists in more than 750
offices. In addition to business support services, Heartland Dental offers its members
collaboration and coaching, including peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
An Inefficient Legacy System
Heartland Dental has always placed an emphasis on ensuring the security of its
widespread IT infrastructure. The company had originally deployed firewalls from a highprofile manufacturer, but device management capabilities and the feature set it delivered
were not keeping pace with Heartland Dental’s rapidly evolving requirements. Ross
Petty, senior network security engineer for Heartland Dental, recalls, “It was possible
to interrogate an individual computer in a specific dental office but very challenging to
efficiently achieve this visibility across the entire network.”
Heartland Dental has been extremely successful for a number of years, but the continuous
expansion had exacerbated several inherent limitations in its infrastructure. Its IT department
launched a project to improve cross-infrastructure monitoring, ease administration, and
elevate its overall security posture. A proof of concept (POC) was constructed to evaluate
potential new solutions, and multiple vendors were invited to participate.
“Fortinet has delivered a
tightly coordinated security
strategy that gives us elevated
protection, control and visibility
across our entire infrastructure.
In turn, we’ve been able to pass
these benefits on to our own
clients: Everyone wins!”
– Ross Petty, Senior Network Security
Engineer, Heartland Dental
Details
Customer: Heartland Dental
Industry: Business Services
Location: Effingham, Illinois
A comprehensive set of criteria was created to gauge the capabilities of POC
participants, including execution against an extensive number of threat management
functionalities and reporting requirements. The IT team quickly settled on Fortinet: “The
other vendors simply couldn’t do what Fortinet could,” notes Petty. “We knew that protecting our diverse attack surface would require a
multi-product solution and were particularly impressed by the cohesion of the Fortinet Security Fabric architecture.” Based on the POC
performance, Heartland Dental began the phased implementation of a broad suite of Fortinet products.
Ease of Installation and Deployment
The FortiGate enterprise firewall appliance with Fortinet Security Fabric was the first model selected to replace legacy hardware in dental offices, immediately
providing flexible visibility into suspicious activities across the entire Heartland Dental environment—something that was previously impossible. The FortiGate’s
intuitive interface made the deployment very straightforward, without any need for special instruction or training. A combination of FortiAP 223C
access points and the wireless-enabled FortiWiFi 3G4G were chosen for many satellite offices, delivering redundant internet capabilities to
remote locations that, in multiple instances, provided better connectivity than many clients’ existing internet throughput speeds.
1
CASE STUDY | Major Dental Support Organization Enjoys Enhanced Protection with a Lowered Total Cost of Ownership
Heartland Dental also installed the FortiSandbox advanced threat-detection system to evaluate
suspicious code and URLs in a separate, self-contained, secure environment. “We utilize a hub and
spoke architecture, so if malware tries to spread anywhere across the network the FortiSandbox
immediately picks it up and quickly blocks the threat before any damage can occur,” explains Petty.
Prestaging equipment is a valued service offered to its clients by Heartland Dental.
Hardware is initially shipped to the company’s main office, where it is preloaded with
software, configured, and connected to the virtual private network (VPN). Just prior to
being shipped to a dental office, devices are registered with the FortiManager security
management system, and FortiDeploy is utilized to enable the rapid capture of serial
numbers and device configurations with minimal human intervention.
“We try to ensure that any solution we implement can be scaled, for the purpose of
simplicity and ease of management,” comments Petty. “However, it’s pretty common for
locally supported offices to use a variety of proprietary applications that we don’t support,
but the FortiGate’s flexibility makes this really easy to accommodate.”
The robust reporting and troubleshooting capabilities of FortiAnalyzer further enhance
visibility and governance throughout the Heartland Dental environment. The appliance
facilitates logging, reporting, and analysis of suspected threats as soon as they arise.
Visibility is provided at a meta level, with the ability to immediately drill down to an individual
device, application, or IP address.
Business Impact
nnImproved
resource utilization and
quality of coverage with crossenterprise visibility
nnLowered
total cost of ownership,
combined with enhanced service
levels and security
nnStreamlined
deployment process
and diminished potential for errors
nnCentralized
management,
decreased staffing requirements,
and increased control
Solutions
nnFortiGate
nnFortiWiFi
Cost-effective with Improved Performance
nnFortiAP
Onsite testing also revealed that the wireless capabilities of the FortiWiFi 3G4G appliances
were superior to the units they replaced, removing the frequent need to add more hardware
to achieve satisfactory connectivity and throughput. The FortiWiFi’s inherent flexibility has
supported the conversion of all VPNs from static to dynamic routing—with automated
failover steering—enabling Heartland Dental to improve the level of service it provides to
supported offices with enhanced resiliency and fault tolerance.
nnFortiManager
nnFortiAnalyzer
nnFortiSandbox
Heartland Dental has standardized on the FortiGate 60E—with hundreds of units deployed in a wide variety of office environments, most
requiring nominal configuration changes prior to installation. The highly flexible FortiAP gives clients the ability to add secure wireless
access points that seamlessly integrate with the FortiGate 60E, dramatically simplifying both deployment and ongoing management when
compared with point solutions from other vendors. FortiManager has reduced overhead significantly by enabling configuration changes to
be centrally disseminated rather than dictating that changes are made to each firewall individually.
Replacement of the legacy firewalls has yielded enhanced performance at a lower cost. “The entire suite of Fortinet solutions has
dramatically reduced our total cost of ownership when I compare it to our previous vendor,” states Petty. “We have lowered costs and with
better performance and protection.”
Leveraging the Fortinet Security Fabric, the multiple Fortinet products deployed by Heartland Dental provide a tightly integrated solution
that addresses the diverse challenges of the organization’s widely distributed infrastructure. The inherent scalability, cross-collaboration, and
centralized oversight shared across the Security Fabric ensure that the company can continue to securely achieve its business goals.
Petty concludes, “The Fortinet Security Fabric delivers a tightly coordinated security strategy that gives us elevated protection, governance,
and visibility across our entire infrastructure. In turn, we’ve been able to pass these benefits on to the offices we support; everyone wins!”
www.fortinet.com
Copyright © 2020 Fortinet, Inc. All rights reserved. Fortinet®, FortiGate®, FortiCare® and FortiGuard®, and certain other marks are registered trademarks of Fortinet, Inc., and other Fortinet names herein may also be registered and/or common law
trademarks of Fortinet. All other product or company names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Performance and other metrics contained herein were attained in internal lab tests under ideal conditions, and actual performance and other
results may vary. Network variables, different network environments and other conditions may affect performance results. Nothing herein represents any binding commitment by Fortinet, and Fortinet disclaims all warranties, whether express or implied,
except to the extent Fortinet enters a binding written contract, signed by Fortinet’s General Counsel, with a purchaser that expressly warrants that the identified product will perform according to certain expressly-identified performance metrics and, in
such event, only the specific performance metrics expressly identified in such binding written contract shall be binding on Fortinet. For absolute clarity, any such warranty will be limited to performance in the same ideal conditions as in Fortinet’s internal
lab tests. Fortinet disclaims in full any covenants, representations, and guarantees pursuant hereto, whether express or implied. Fortinet reserves the right to change, modify, transfer, or otherwise revise this publication without notice, and the most
current version of the publication shall be applicable. Fortinet disclaims in full any covenants, representations, and guarantees pursuant hereto, whether express or implied. Fortinet reserves the right to change, modify, transfer, or otherwise revise this
publication without notice, and the most current version of the publication shall be applicable.
January 18, 2020 12:22 AM
583141-0-0-EN
D:\Fortinet\Case Study\Heartland Dental\cs-major-dental-suppoort-organization-enjoys-enhanced-protection-V1-1182020-1222PM
">
