Rhode Island Blood Center Protects Donor Information and Locates Laptops Using Absolute Secure Endpoint

With Absolute Secure Endpoint, the Blood Bank is Able to Comply With Regulations and Reduce Risk in the Event Devices Are Lost or Stolen

The Rhode Island Blood Center is a six-location independent blood bank that serves as the only source of blood and blood products for the hospitals in the state of Rhode Island. The Center was established in 1979 as a non-profit community blood center. Today, the Center’s important work is carried out by a team of 350 employees and 180 volunteers.

The Story

Safeguard Devices With an Asset Management Solution

The Rhode Island Blood Center had no asset tracking on their laptops and began to worry about what would happen if a laptop, and the confidential donor information it contained, went missing or was stolen.

IT Systems Manager David Reynolds recalled some of the challenges the Center faced. “We have blood drives state-wide, and laptops go out on each of them,” Reynolds said. “In 2005, we didn’t have any asset tracking or information protection. We wanted the ability to remotely track the whereabouts of these laptops and secure the confidential data they contained.”

Security Challenges

Easy Deployment
And Use

Saves
Money

Protects
Information

"Absolute Secure Endpoint is a very simple, cost-effective solution to track hardware assets. It makes IT people’s lives easier — and that’s good, because we have enough to worry about. We are amazed by the Absolute Persistence® technology. An IT team member took a hard drive out and put it on another machine. The Absolute software agent created itself on the new machine and the old machine with a new hard drive. Indestructible."

DAVID REYNOLDS
SYSTEMS MANAGER, IT
RHODE ISLAND BLOOD CENTER

The Solutions

How They Did It

Protect Devices and Data With Remote Freeze and Delete Capabilities

Rhode Island Blood Center has Absolute Secure Endpoint installed on 72 laptops, and plans to install on 30 Lenovo tablets.

“Since installing Absolute Secure Endpoint, we’ve executed six device freezes and data deletes,” Reynolds said. “Of those, two laptops were destroyed in a large flood. Four, however, were stolen from our Center locations and we executed a data delete right away so none of our confidential data was compromised.”

Retain Command of All Endpoints, All the Time

“I endorse Absolute Secure Endpoint as a means to track mobile devices,” Reynolds said. “The functionality keeps getting better in each version, which makes recommending the solution even easier. In the Absolute Console, we can see which laptop has which software installed, if anyone has been fooling around with the hard drive or memory, and if people were logging in with usernames that shouldn’t have been.”

Robust Reporting Helps Track Misplaced Devices

“We really like the Device Location History Report,” Reynolds continued. “When a laptop has been inadvertently left in a room or a car, this report helps our users quickly find it. When someone is on a road trip, the last thing we want to do is remotely wipe a machine that’s maybe just been left in a meeting room.”

"The price was a great selling point, plus Absolute had all the benefits we were looking for and then some. Deployment was easy, took just a couple of weeks. Now, if a laptop goes missing, we can remotely delete the information on it and report the laptop as missing in a police report."

DAVID REYNOLDS
SYSTEMS MANAGER, IT
RHODE ISLAND BLOOD CENTER

The Results

Protecting Donor Information And Reducing Risk

Thanks to Absolute Secure Endpoint, the blood bank was able to experience improvements in security, ease of use and deployment, and efficiency.

For Rhode Island Blood Center, Absolute Secure Endpoint:

  • Delivers a simple-to-use solution for managing and protecting laptops
  • Finds and recovers lost or stolen devices, saving the Center the money of having to replace them
  • Provides the ability to freeze a device or delete data on it if it is lost or stolen, protecting donor information and providing an important component for compliance with AABB and FDA regulations

Absolute Platform FAQ

The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.

The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:

  • Absolute Persistence Technology

Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.

No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.

  • Absolute Resilience Technology

The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:

  • Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
  • Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
  • Absolute Intelligence

Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.

Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.

Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:

  • Web console
  • Mobile app
  • Rules and policy engine
  • Alerts
  • Dashboards
  • APIs
  • Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
  • Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)

Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.

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