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In the News
2006 Up & Comer in Healthcare – Elemental Security
June 1, 2006
Courtesy of Healthcare Informatics
By Mark Hagland
Elemental Security
When San Mateo, Calif.-based Elemental Security was going through a three-year development period prior to its launch in the spring of 2005, then-board member Peter Watkins, who had formerly run Santa Clara, Calif.-based McAfee, Inc., kept asking developers of the company's security processes solution if they could cut corners with one piece of the initial concept and quickly launch to success, but they refused to compromise.
Fourteen months after the company began signing contracts, Watkins says its early developers were right to insist on breadth of functionality. He says no other process-oriented security solution combines policy management (with over 2,000 rules codified), user-activity inventorying, host configuration, and network access, into a single integrated solution. For example, if a hospital's policy forbids those with access to personal health data from installing online instant messaging — and someone installs IM anyway — Elemental's solution can not only automatically identify the rogue application, but take action, severing network access.
Elemental Security is still just emerging from its start-up phase with 12 active organizational customers and another 40 “in the pipeline,” Watkins says. The need for hospitals — as well as others — to respond to expanding regulatory data protection mandates will only continue to grow, he notes.