How Cobalt transforms the way healthcare companies pentest

With Cobalt, Sentara Healthcare finds in-depth security testing aligned with healthcare requirements.

Sentara Healthcare is a not-for-profit health system serving Virginia and North Carolina, with 12 hospitals, outpatient care centers, imaging centers, and more. Sentara had interest from their cloud and DevOps teams to test new applications in development and systems the company was migrating to a cloud environment. In an industry that has recently been a big target for hackers, security is one of the most important aspects—that’s where Cobalt’s pentest solution provides visibility into weaknesses and supports remediation.

The importance of keeping customer healthcare data secure is a top priority for Sentara. To have a secure environment, organizations should have in-depth security testing, and that's where pentesting comes in.

The security team at Sentara Healthcare had received interest from their cloud and DevOps teams to do pentesting on a new application and they were looking for a solution that would integrate better with their team. After a thorough evaluation process, Sentara decided on Cobalt because of three factors: speed, availability, and communication efficiencies.

In prior cases, Sentara had to engage a company and go through a lot of paperwork–– it would take many days to even get testing started. Delays in the testing process can slow down their entire rollout and effectively cost them more money.

Cobalt is available before, during, and after the pentesting process and to communicate in real-time if any additional security testing is needed. Sentara was able to request testing for a new system, and within a couple of days, they were ready to go. Cobalt immediately notified them about any critical findings, and the flow of communication was open for Sentara to go ahead and respond in real-time.

With Cobalt as a partner, Sentara can do direct integrations between the Cobalt system and their Jira ticketing system. This makes it easier to get findings out to developers quickly so they can be remediated earlier.