Vaccinating Handheld ComputersVaccinating Handheld Computers

Johns Hopkins Medicine has turned to a firewall designed for handheld computers to protect doctors who are using Pocket PC devices to gain instant access to medical data. The medical school and health-care organization recently deployed a wireless LAN to let doctors use the devices to update medical records, access radiography information, and write prescriptions. But security was a concern.

Johns Hopkins is using Bluefire Security Technologies' Mobile Firewall Plus, which supports the Advanced Encryption Standard to secure data. The firewall enforces strict device password protection and provides network communication analysis to help protect against potential threats. It also alerts IT managers when it spots unwanted changes to system files, registries, and applications.

"Handhelds are increasing in functionality, and that means more security risks," says Darren Lacey, executive director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Mobile Firewall Plus will also let Johns Hopkins centrally control the handhelds, define security policies, and deploy security rules to devices from a single management console. Its relational management database will let IT managers consolidate policies and profiles and provide historical event logs for incident reporting.

Johns Hopkins will deploy the firewall on 1,000 handhelds by year's end. Pricing for Mobile Firewall Plus starts at $15,000, which includes one enterprise manager and 50 handheld agents.

Both Johns Hopkins and Bluefire are ahead when it comes to securing handhelds, Gartner analyst John Pescatore says. "Right now most of the investment in this area is coming from the Department of Defense, financial firms, and health care," he says. "We don't expect this to become a very big market until 2005."