Health IQ Scales Up Cloud Security and Agility with Virtru

The Result

• Compliance with regulatory requirements, including HIPAA, state regulations, and Medicare requirements.
• Protection of customer payment details and protected health information (PHI), as well as personally identifiable information.
• Meets the security needs of a quickly growing workforce.
• Integrates with their SIEM tool for a clear, unified picture of data sharing across the organization.

Maximizing Security and Privacy for Health Insurance

Health IQ is a cloud-first insurance broker with a unique mission: To reward customers with lower insurance rates based on healthy lifestyle choices such as diet and exercise. As part of its work connecting customers with insurance carriers such as Medicare, it manages sensitive payment, health, and proprietary data that needs to be protected.

Health IQ assesses its members’ current health, health literacy, and active lifestyle to offer lower insurance rates. Health IQ equips its entire workforce with Virtru encryption for Google Workspace in order to safeguard data, enabling them to protect messages and attachments sent through Gmail as well as files stored and shared in Google Drive.

Making Encryption a Natural Part of Users’ Workflows

Health IQ is a rapidly growing company, having secured four rounds of funding totaling over $136 million. Its workforce is expanding quickly, and each new employee is given a Virtru license to protect the information they process and share. Onboarding such a high volume of new employees is a challenge, particularly because Health IQ is 100% remote. “New employees can be a little overwhelmed when they start, because they're learning new applications and everything's new to them. After all that onboarding training, Virtru may be the last thing they're thinking about,” said Chad Bairnsfather, CISO of Health IQ. “But the thing about the way Virtru works is they don't have to. When they use Gmail to send an email, they’ll see the blue button, and they’ll remember it. Or when they take a file and they put it on Google drive, a pop-up window will ask them if they want to encrypt it, by default. Because of the way it’s set up, it’s natural for them.” Health IQ also uses Virtru’s warning feature to prompt people to double-check the information they’re sending through email. “Virtru’s warning feature gives them a chance to verify that they're sending the right thing to the right person. We're giving them an opportunity to take a second look.” Health IQ can use Virtru’s native data protection features to confirm whether shared information in emails was encrypted or if it was viewed by the email recipient.

Simplifying Data Loss Prevention

Data loss prevention (DLP) can be complex. Virtru allowed for Bairnsfather and his team to operationalize DLP quickly. Health IQ brings Virtru usage data into its SIEM tool for a holistic picture of data sharing across the organization, providing maximum visibility in one place. Bairnsfather encourages other tech leaders to consider Virtru as an option to simplify the DLP process. “Some people don't want to even consider putting something new in because of past experience. But Virtru is so easy. This is like the ‘easy button’ for DLP. This gets you what you need without having to put in a lot of infrastructure, effort, and time. It’s a seamless setup.” As Health IQ continues to grow quickly, its cloud-native partners such as Virtru provide it the agility it needs to succeed. “Virtru’s seamless integration with our cloud partners allows us to grow and deploy quick data protection solutions that fit our needs.”

For more information on how Virtru can help you achieve your secure data sharing objectives, please contact us today.

About Health IQ

Health IQ believes the best way to encourage health-conscious lifestyles is to invest in those who invest in themselves, every day. Health IQ invented a new way to price insurance, combining patented online assessments; data from exercise and step measurement devices; metabolic test results; and peer-reviewed science to determine lower insurance rates for people who demonstrate a commitment to maintaining their health.

Health IQ Scales Up Cloud Security and Agility with Virtru

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