Case History

Managed Services – Healthcare

Client Profile:

• Central Oklahoma children’s hospital with 125 beds
• 10 Servers, 175 workstations, wireless user and guest networks, Cisco switch and router infrastructure

Managed Services Objectives:

·         Improve cost-effectiveness of IT services operations

·         Due to significant power and environmental challenges, provide alerting for network performance and device alerts, as well as real-time alerts due to high temperature, low-humidity events in server and network equipment areas

·         Provide managed real-time patching of servers and workstations

·         Provide real-time alerting of issues with stopped services and issues with disk space on servers as this has been a consistent problem for this client

Managed Services Results:

·         Within the first six months of deployment, Managed Services alerted numerous times due to server room temperature and humidity going out of specs which provided evidence to force the HVAC contractor to make necessary control adjustments.  This has saved thousands of dollars in network equipment damage

·         Managed Services provided alerts which identified power supply issues to one of the system's core switches, and reduced downtime for that portion of the network to less than 15 minutes due to responsiveness of alerts

·         Within two months of deployment patching effectiveness was improved from an average of 30-40 missing server patches (per server) and 20-30 missing workstation patches (per workstation) to less than 5 missing patches per server and 1-3 missing patches per workstation

·         Alerting by Managed Services simplified troubleshooting when firmware on in-line web filter failed causing an internet outage, reducing downtime to less than one hour

·         When medical staff inadvertently dumped 200+GB of data to a space sensitive server, the loss of space was identified in time to halt the dump before the hard drive filled, thus averting a probable server crash

·         On over 20 occasions in the past year Managed Services has alerted due to disk drive bad blocks being detected either on servers or on workstations which has allowed the client to either remdiate or replace the bad drives prior to any client impact

·         Managed Services has alerted on occasions when Active Directory experienced replication problems such that remediation could be done without impact on users

·         On occasion Managed Services has alerted when database transaction logs are not properly committed allowing IT staff to correct the problem with minimal impact on users