Published on 03-Oct-2011
Customer:
Edmonton Public School Board
Industry:
Education
Deployment country:
Canada
Solution:
Security: Governance, Risk and Compliance
Overview
The Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) operates a primary and secondary school system that educates 80,000 students at 228 facilities throughout the Edmonton, Alberta metropolitan area.
Business need:
Reduce cost and improve quality of IT operations; reduce need for in-person service calls; implement a “Tech as a Utility” internal market business model.
Solution:
With a comprehensive endpoint management solution, software upgrades and asset inventory now take a fraction of the time that they previously required, saving resources and making it easier for staff to use existing equipment and maintain compliance with licensing requirements.
Benefits:
Reduced patch management staffing requirements from 3 - 4 full-time employees to one person focusing on patches part-time; eliminated laptop theft tracking service at a cost of $130/laptop; enabled updates to be sent to, installed on, and validated on thousands of computers from a single laptop.
Video
Richard D’Amours, Senior Network Analyst with Edmonton Public Schools, speaks to addressing big security challenges on a small budget
- Richard D’Amours, Senior Network Analyst with Edmonton Public Schools, speaks to addressing big security challenges on a small budget (2:26)
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Video Transcript
Title: Addressing big security challenges on a small budget
I’m Richard D’Amours, Senior Network Analyst with Edmonton Public Schools.
… I think we have the same security challenges that any large corporation has, except that we’re having to do it on a very limited budget.
… We’re trying to keep the money in the classroom, so we don’t want a lot of time being spent on IT. …
… we have 29,000 endpoints. It’s a combination of teacher stations, students, administration stations.
We see a lot of mobility, a lot of devices, netbooks, laptops, coming in and off the network and we have to be able to address those …
… in real-time.
We had a lot of automated processes but they were duplicated across 220 different sites, so now, with Tivoli Endpoint Manager, we’re able to have a holistic view of the network ….
It’s massive time savings to be able to have the proper tool to do that.
… It essentially changes the way that our department delivers IT because we can do it in a really efficient way,
… I was on vacation in Hawaii and we had a relatively critical patch that had to be pushed out across all 25,000 workstations at the time, and because I did have BigFix, I was able to remote back into the console and push that out in minutes while I still had my feet in the sand ....
We had an instance where we had the accountants going out to install financial software and it would have taken 55 days, and I was able to script it and I think we knocked it down to, like, maybe two days….
… on the patch management side of things, what we have is the ability to see all 29,000 stations anytime, on or off the network. I can look for vulnerabilities and I can patch them with policy.
We’re very comfortable with our compliance levels with Tivoli Endpoint Manager.
We’re always in compliance, in total compliance. …
…. Before, it was too many manual processes. Now, the client reports in real-time and I can track our compliance. It’s a non-issue….
It’s the visibility, it’s the control and it’s the automation ….
Why IBM?
It was sort of a best-of-breed solution, Tivoli Endpoint Manager. After a very detailed RFP process, that was the best that I saw out there
It totally lives up to our expectations. And in the back end, just the support that we’ve been given by IBM, it’s second to none.
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
Tivoli Endpoint Manager for Power Management, Tivoli Endpoint Manager for Lifecycle Management, Tivoli Endpoint Manager for Patch Management