Healthcare cybersecurity efficiency at St. Ann’s Community

How a healthcare provider improved cybersecurity efficiency, cutting incident investigations from hours to minutes with an integrated platform that simplifies compliance and helps a lean IT team stay ahead of threats.

Key takeaways

• St. Ann’s Community consolidated multiple security and data protection tools into the BarracudaONE® platform to improve visibility and operational efficiency.
• The organization reduced incident investigation times from hours to minutes with Barracuda Managed XDR.
• Enhanced email security has made phishing investigations faster and easier while providing broader protection across inbound, outbound, and internal messages.
• Long-term email retention and archiving capabilities help support compliance and e-discovery requirements in a highly regulated healthcare environment.
• A significantly smaller IT team is able to manage growing security demands through automation, unified management, and streamlined workflows.

For healthcare organizations, cybersecurity efficiency is about far more than stopping attacks. It is about protecting sensitive patient information, maintaining regulatory compliance, and ensuring clinicians and staff can access the systems they depend on every day. St. Ann’s Community shows how a lean IT team can do all three with an integrated platform, BarracudaONE.

Those challenges became especially acute for St. Ann’s Community, a Rochester, New York-based healthcare provider serving approximately 3,000 patients and senior residents across five communities. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization faced growing security demands while simultaneously coping with major staffing and financial pressures.

The result was a search for technologies that could help a smaller IT team operate more efficiently without compromising security. Download the full case study to get all the details of St. Ann’s journey.

Moving beyond fragmented security tools

Like many healthcare organizations, St. Ann’s Community had accumulated a collection of security and infrastructure solutions over time. As the organization modernized its environment and expanded its use of Microsoft 365 and cloud technologies, leadership began looking for an integrated platform, like BarracudaONE, that could simplify security and compliance.

According to Chief Information Officer Aaron Fields, the goal was to reduce complexity and gain a single view across the security environment rather than constantly switching between multiple systems.

A lean IT team needed greater efficiency

The pandemic created lasting financial challenges for many healthcare organizations, and St. Ann’s Community was no exception.

As the organization adjusted to new realities, staffing reductions affected multiple departments, including IT. Aaron Fields says that approximately 10 members of the IT team were laid off, effectively cutting the department in half. Despite the reduction in resources, the team remained responsible for protecting sensitive healthcare systems and supporting the business.

“My goal is simple: save my team time,” says Aaron Fields. “If we can find tools that make us more efficient, we'll invest in them.”

How Barracuda Managed XDR cut investigations from hours to minutes

One of the most significant improvements came from the adoption of Barracuda Managed XDR.

Before implementing the solution, security investigations often required manually reviewing alerts across multiple tools and systems. According to Thomas O’Halloran, Cybersecurity Engineer at St. Ann’s Community, the process frequently required substantial investigation just to determine whether an alert represented a real threat.

With Barracuda Managed XDR, much of that work is automated and supported by Barracuda's SOC team. Validated threats are investigated quickly, containment actions can be taken immediately, and the IT team receives clear information about what happened and what action was taken.

“What used to take an hour or two now takes minutes,” says Thomas O’Halloran. “It drastically cuts down how much hands-on work I need to do.”

Stronger email security and simpler compliance in healthcare

Enhanced email security has made phishing investigations faster and easier for St. Ann’s Community, while providing broader protection across inbound, outbound, and internal messages. Long-term email retention and archiving capabilities also help the organization support compliance and e-discovery requirements in a highly regulated healthcare environment.

One platform, one view: Unified visibility for healthcare security

Bringing backup, email protection, archiving, and XDR capabilities together under the BarracudaONE platform has also improved visibility for both technical staff and leadership teams.

Centralized reporting allows Aaron Fields to communicate cybersecurity activity and business value more effectively. Instead of trying to explain invisible threats, he can show executives how many potentially malicious emails were blocked and how security investments are helping reduce risk across the organization.

For a resource-constrained team, that combination of visibility, automation, and simplified management has helped establish what Fields describes as a "new normal" where security and efficiency can coexist.

Read the full customer story

The complete case study explores how St. Ann’s Community modernized its security stack, reduced investigation times, simplified compliance, strengthened email security, and helped a lean IT team remain effective during a period of significant change.