A Q&A with Entisys360’s Richard Florence

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, businesses across the nation were forced to shut down offices to mitigate transmission of the virus. One of Entisys360’s clients, a $1.2B not-for-profit health system, faced the challenge of transitioning approximately 800 employees who once worked within their physical hospital offices, to dispersed home offices. This remote set-up impacted end users’ ability to collaborate on initiatives and projects for which they traditionally met face-to-face in meeting rooms. The client approached Entisys360, which proposed a solution for faciliating collaboration and sharing information between team members, in order to sustain ongoing business imperatives.

To learn more about how Entisys360 helped the client enable collaboration within its fully remote workforce, we sat down with Richard Florence, Director of Core Infrasturcture Services, Entisys360, to learn more.

1. Tell us about the solution you recommended for promoting workforce collaboration for Entisys360’s healthcare client?

Entisys360 proposed a phased roll-out of Microsoft Teams starting with features that were easy for end users to learn, then moved to more complex features that required additional infrastructure changes. Based on its past experience, Entisys360 understood the three core elements of successful user adoption of a complex product such as Microsoft Teams:

• Education. Including education on Teams features and capabilities, as well as education of security controls and governance available in Teams.

• Systems Governance. Establishing a governance plan with client leadership.

• A Phased Deployment. Implementing teams along with the associated governance measures.

2. Tell us about the client engagement. What were the key steps you took to meet the client’s business and technology requirements?

We began the client engagement with an interactive workshop which served two primary purposes.

First, the workshop provided Entisys360 with a clear understanding of the client’s business and technical requirements for Microsoft Teams. In order to understand both the high-level requirements and also the day-today user requirements, attendees of the workshop included representatives from all of the major departments within the hospital.

The second purpose of the workshop was to educate attendees on Microsoft Teams capabilities, provide a physical demonstration of the product, and answer any questions attendees had.

Because Microsoft Teams features incorporate the movement of corporate data both internally and externally, governance, security, and compliance were top concerns. During the workshop, Entisys360 gained an understanding of which controls and processes to incorporate into the environment to ensure that corporate data was being protected and that regulatory compliance was met.

3. What were some of the security elements that Entisys360 had to implement for the client?

Some of the security elements that were established as requirements are as follows:

• Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Like most healthcare organizations, our client was subject to HIPAA regulations that outline the treatment of private and confidential patient information such as social security numbers, addresses, health plan numbers, and medical record numbers among other data. The incorporation of DLP allowed the client to identify where this information was stored and develop policies for the treatment of this information.

• Legal Hold and E-Discovery. The preservation of key data beyond established retention and deletion policies enabling the identification of this data for regulatory or litigation purposes.

• Conditional Access Policies. Condition-based policies that verified the identity or users, state of devices and locations from which data was being accessed prior to allowing access to data and applications.

4. What was the outcome of the project?

Ultimately, this project fostered greater collaboration for our client’s employees with its business partners and customers. By providing structured training courses on the optimal usage of Teams features, we were able to ensure that adoption of the product was maintained throughout implementation, and that our client maximized the value they derived from Microsoft Teams. Further, we educated the client on the security risks associated with a fully remote workforce, and developed a remote solution comprised a Zero Trust security model. Based on our recommended security policies, the client has experienced zero security events since implementation of Teams one year ago.

About Entisys360

Entisys360 is an award-winning IT consultancy specializing cybersecurity, cloud, automation, end-user computing, software defined infrastructure, and core infrastructure, with Microsoft expertise for business, government, education and healthcare. For more than three decades, countless numbers of enterprise organizations have achieved their business goals and objectives leveraging the Entisys360’s people, processes and methodology.