Active Directory/HIPPA Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter adfreak
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A

adfreak

I have a potential client who is mulling whether or not to invest a ton of
cash in upgrading to W2K3/AD. They are a company in the Medical Care
industry who has one central location and up to 800 remote branch offices.
Theses branch offices have a mix of Win98/W2K Pro/XP desktops. There is a
project in place for upgrading everyone to XP. These users at the remote
offices simply utilize the pc's to access client/server apps back home at
the central location (i.e. SAP, Lotus Notes). They have no need for things
such as Office, Visio, etc... Along with the previously mentioned
applications are home grown, patient demographic applications they acess.
Presently, these remote sites share usernames/passwords, some usernames do
not require passwords. It's very messy.

The client wants to know why they should go to AD when they can simply throw
up a Firewall to protect the servers which are hosting (SAP, Oracle, Notes,
patient application, etc) and simply let these remote pc's sit in a
workgroup????

My thoughts are MIIS for Single Sign on? And, what is this new ADAM (AD
Applicaton Mode) do for companies? The most important thing for them is
HIPPA compliancy and they want to know how rolling out AD can make them more
secure? Exact examples?

Any insight would be appreciated.
 
If you are helping them design this you should know the reasons for a domain
over a workgroup. This really scares me that a company this big doesn't have
the IT staff to support it. Especially when they are trying to be HIPPA
compliant! Security is one of the biggest reasons. Single sign is also one
but not nearly as important as the Security advantages. A domain creates
secure channels between the clients and the network where a workgroup
doesn't. You can require password changes and group policy to lock
everything down. Simply adding a firewall and letting your users decide how
and when to change their passwords and managing any of that with a workgroup
is just impossible. ESPECIALLY if you have 800 remote offices. Sounds like
you need a local security consultant to help out. There are more reasons
than quoted here and this really isn't the place to get into this sort of
discussion. More guys will probably chime in and give their thoughts but
getting some qualified and certified people on this decision is really what
is needed so they can know and understand a lot more than you can tell us
here and make the proper recommendations.
 
First things first. I've been in the industry 10 years strictly doing
Microsoft work. I'm an MCSE on all three platforms (NT, W2K and Windows
2003) and am very familiar with the differences between a domain and
workgroup. I guess you didn't read my statement close enough. The client
is saying that since everyone of those 800 + remote sites does not require
security principals accessing resources in the domain, then why bother
putting them in the domain? They won't need to push out group
polices,etc...

They're more concerned with the servers in the central site hosting the data
for there medical applications (which require application
usernames/passwords). They want to know why they should fork up $500K+ to
roll out AD when their top priority this year is securing the applications
for HIPPA compliancy. I simply wrote asking if MIIS and or ADAM (both newly
introduced recently) could help them out?

Why isn't this the place to get "into this kind of discussion"?? I thought
this was a newsgroup where fellow engineers learn off one another, not blast
each other...
 
Ok, I misunderstood your post a little AND I was not blasting you at all.
Your post read as if you didn't know the difference between a workgroup and
a domain. So for that I am sorry, and why I sounded like I was blasting your
knowledge. If these remote sites login with some secure VPN or something to
that effect that should be fine. I was under the impresion that these remote
sites were already on the domain. If they have some sort of authentication
to the main site to get into whatever apps they need etc. then the remote
sites may not need to be part of a domain. And the reason for this being a
little inappropriate for this type of discussions if that there is always
more that we need to know and no one wants to write a book to answer
questions and there is typically so much we would need to know to be useful
that a lot of times we may not have the big picture to answer appropriately.
Certainly not saying that we won't try to help. That's what MVP's
do.....help out for free. Let's see what we can find for your specific
questions below...
 
Thanks, and I too apolozie if I sounded harsh in my response.

It's just that my back is against the wall in trying to do presales work in
scoring this big time engagment. From what I've heard, we're the leading
candidate. He (the VP) basically needs justification from me that deploying
AD will make his company more secure when they go through an upcoming HIPPA
audit. He then needs to go to the CIO to relay that to him in the hope that
he gets a thumbs up and funding.
 
Thanks.

I'm probably correct in my assumption that ADAM will not support home grown
applications?

Appreciate your help
 
Hard to say for sure. Unfortunately that is one that you will have to test
to be sure. Typically if your app is using standard MS API's and such it
should work but you and I both know that sometimes programmers do strange
things and as MS tries to lock down the systems more and more sometimes apps
break.....
 
ANother thought I have is to maybe start at your main site with domain
upgrades etc...so you can lock down all those systems and such and then test
with your clients and see how it works. Basically what I am saying is that
maybe it is a stepping process where you don't necessarily include or
upgrade your remote sites to a domain or into your domain as you test and
see how things work and how secure they are. I don't think there is going to
be a blanket, one answer for all, for this situation. I'm sure some of the
other guys will chime in with some thoughts? Fellas?
 
Yes. I went in and did a 3 week assessment:

12 NT 4.0 Domains disperesed Geographically with users/computers in each one
1 of those NT Domains has two way trusts to all other 11 (makes up the
hub/spoke topology)
24,000 total employees, but only 9500 user accounts (gives you an idea how
non compliant they are, sharing usernames/passwords)
Pure NT 4.0 Domains. Ironically, 70 out of the 85 Wintel servers are
running W2K Server. The only ones still running NT 4.0 Server are literally
the domain controllers so they're in good shape there. The hardware
resources are fine (dual xeon's, 2gb ram, 5x72gb PowerEdges)

They simply don't care much about the remote sites since they are simply
clinics with nurses in there running a mix of Win98/W2K Pro/Xp, some in the
domain and some in a workgroup.
 
A Windows Forest would certainly clean a lot of things up but of course that
is a LOT of work. As you know all the trusts and such would be gone with a
Forest and you would get a lot more control over everything but like you
said your not too concerned or maybe not even in charge of these remote
sites so why mess with them. I would recommend your Internal domain moving
to Windows 2k or 2k3 domain just for all the added features but that could
be a hard sell. The biggest part would be the security of the system since,
in theory, Win2k and above are more secure than NT4. Also AD gives you so
much more control over the domain itself with Group policy that this may be
a selling point to your bosses. Basically less administrative overhead for
you to roll out software or patches or locking down of client machine. This
is soooo much better with Group policy than with NT policies. Also you could
incorporate RRAS and use L2TP with IPSEC for many of your Win2k and up
clients with the VPN. This does provide another layer of remote security but
since you have down level clients you'll have to support PPTP for RRAS as
well. That certainly is a trusting mess and with all the ports open for
these trusts that sounds a little like a swiss cheese firewall. I would look
at removing the Trusts and using some sort of VPN and let the users login to
your domain to use the apps and use usernames and passwords from your domain
so that you can control that part and make things more secure. of course w/o
knowing why these trusts are in place than I can't be sure they can go away.
Having some solid site to site VPN's may be another way, this would make the
connection back to the main office a little more transparent to the users.
unfortunately this typically requires the same type of VPN devices at each
location.
 
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