Сygna Auditor Platform in the productive operation at the University Hospital Frankfurt am Main

Сygna Auditor Platform in the productive operation at the University Hospital Frankfurt am Main 

Originally established as a foundation of the Jewish bourgeoisie in 1914, the University Hospital Frankfurt am Main is not only one of the most renowned but also one of the largest university hospitals in Germany, employing around 7,000 staff, running 32 hospital departments and 20 research institutes. A total of about 51,000 inpatients and 450,000 outpatients are cared for at Frankfurt University Hospital every year. The University Hospital cooperates with the Goethe University Frankfurt in the areas of research and general patient care. In addition, 14 lecture halls for over 4000 students, as well as further training opportunities for technical medical assistants, are available to the area of education, training and further education, in part through cooperation with the Goethe University in Frankfurt.

Patient safety is always a top priority. Comprehensive quality and risk management is an indis-pensable part of this.

The IT infrastructure of the university hospital is responsible for operating all central IT systems in the clinical network. Around 900 servers and systems, as well as a large number of company-central data areas and databases, are currently stored in virtualised, central storage networks. The data is distributed redundantly to two data centres. The department for central AD infrastructure is responsible for managing the network for a total of more than 600 switches, which in turn contain approx. 13,000 active network ports, routers, firewalls, wired network access points and almost 1,000 wireless LAN access points for wireless network access. One of the services coordinated here are the language and data services of the clinical and scientific areas.

“The cooperation with N3K and Cygna Labs has been very positive throughout the entire project cycle.“

Ralf Kutt

IT administrator for internal IT infrastructure at Frankfurt University Hospital

The Challenge

A regular backup of the Active Directory was previously carried out using Veeam and DataCore Continous. However, due to the increased delegation of administrative tasks to a growing number of people, the traceability of changes in the AD & file system was missing.

Which was an enormous administrative and time-consuming effort for the IT specialists at the University Hospital Frankfurt. Particularly Change Auditing, the complete traceability of changes in the ActiveDirectory and File System environment, is of great importance in the medical sector.Being classified as a KRITIS company also increased the requirements for change auditing enormously. By taking appropriate measures, it will be possible to restore accidentally deleted or lost data in a time-efficient, cross-linked and trouble-free manner in the future. 

“What was particularly pleasing was that the N3K experts had directly involved us in the development. We have always been in direct contact with Cygna Labs in Canada.“

Ralf Kutt

IT administrator for internal IT infrastructure at Frankfurt University Hospital

Rollout / Implementation

The two modules Auditor for AD & Auditor for File System were implemented in October 2020. The process of implementing the solution proceeded smoothly and within the planned timeframe.

Ralf Kutt considers the Cygna Auditor Platform modules to be future-oriented and indispensable for any troubleshooting. As soon as the Cygna Auditor modules were implemented, the orthopaedic clinic was integrated into the IT infrastructure of the university hospital. With the help of the Cygna modules, the IT department was able to do this easily and time-efficiently.

An important reason for the project‘s successful course was that we always stayed in contact and in dialogue with Cygna Labs and N3K, says Ralf Kutt.