Case Study: Health & Social Care in Northern Ireland achieves lower total cost of ownership and stronger two-factor authentication with Thales SafeNet Authentication Service PCE

Health and Social Care - Customer Case Study

Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland needed to strengthen authentication across its five HSC Trusts and supporting organizations to meet ISO27001 and Connecting for Health guidance. Facing a costly legacy two‑factor system that relied on hardware tokens replaced every three years, the organization sought a more secure, lower‑cost 2FA solution; Thales’ SafeNet Authentication Service PCE (SAS PCE) was selected to address these requirements.

Thales implemented SAS PCE as a server‑based 2FA platform, providing durable hardware tokens plus soft, USB, SMS and BlackBerry options, delegated administration across trusts and a framework contract to scale deployment. The HSC moved from an initial 1,000 token purchase to around 2,000 tokens in use by July 2009, reduced token replacement and administration costs, and is on track to realize the forecast three‑year cost savings while improving compliance and secure access to sensitive web applications.

Health and Social Care

Michael Harnett

ICT Security Manager