Inclusive Company

As a global business, Northwest creates an inclusive environment that encourages all people to bring their unique self and passion to work, allowing them to feel safe in doing so.

Intentional culture

Northwest must attract, retain, and support our talent to ensure sustainable success in an equitable culture. Northwest aspires to create a workforce that reflects the diverse communities in which it operates.

As Northwest continues to lead at the intersection of healthcare real estate and sustainability, it must attract, retain, and support our talent to ensure sustainable success in an equitable culture. Northwest aspires to create a workforce that reflects the diverse communities in which it operates. This includes Australia and New Zealand where Vital is managed.

Cybersecurity and upgrades

Northwest IT has undertaken five significant initiatives to harden our cyber security and protect our digital assets.

The upgrades were in response to new requirements from our Cyber Security Insurer and the general increase in Cyber threats from the global pandemic and the war in Russia.

NSM and Firewall fleet upgrade

We upgraded our aging Sonicwall Firewall assets with the latest hardware and replaced our global firewall management system (GMS) with the newest management and reporting platform (Network security manager – NSM). The upgrade gives us better visibility into security threats across our offices, and a more automated tool for ensuring that are firewalls are up to date and correctly configured to block cyber threats.

Upgrade to Veeam

We moved our primary backup infrastructure off of an outdated platform (ARCserve) to the highest-rated platform in the industry (Veeam). Veeam provides more recovery options along with easier and faster recovery options.

WASABI Immutable Backup Store

To ensure a layer of impermeable data protection against ransomware, we added WASABI backup solution. WASABI is an immutable backup store that would be incorruptible by ransomware. WASABI is a cloud solution and a 3rd layer of backup replication.

KnowBe4

Knowbe4 is a cyber security training and testing platform. We use the software to send out email phishing simulations to help us identify which of our staff requires cyber security training. We provide onboarding cyber security training for new employees and use Knowbe4 for testing and quarterly training updates. Our goal is to ensure that our employees have the skills to help protect our organization against a cyber attack.

Duo MFA

We now use a best-in-class Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) platform called DUO from Cisco for externally facing services. MFA double-checks each user’s identity so cyber attackers can’t use that lost or compromised passwords to access our network.

Reconciliation & cultural awareness

Together we create value though people, place and community and this extends to our first placemakers – the First National people of Australia, and Māori in New Zealand. With this in mind a reconciliation workgroup has been created to lift our focus and commit our good intention to improved actions in 2022.

We have committed to two priorities; deliver online training for all our staff in A/NZ to ensure a baseline understanding of indigenous matters across Māori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and the development of a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP).

These two priorities, together with sponsorship of our reconciliation workgroup by our leadership team help us to focus and start our journey of reconciliation with the intention in the medium term we will go deeper and focus on improved outcomes in the health industry as well as partners with other like minded organisations to continue to advance and learn.