Overview

The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust provides hospital and adult community services to a population of about 450,000. The Trust’s IT organization of 74 employees manages over 7,500 devices for nearly 12,000 users across 70 locations, providing broad support and services to the Trust’s medical and administrative staff.

The Challenge

As the implications of COVID-19 became clear, the Trust made the decision to move the majority of its non-essential workers to home offices, requiring the IT organization to quickly strategize a better solution for managing its employees’ devices off the network. Prior to this emergency, the asset management tool in use by the Trust was very slow to deploy, gave IT no ability to deploy offsite and no visibility to devices being used offsite, and created the potential for troubling security and compliance issues as a result.

The Solution

The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust implemented BMC Helix Client Management because of the solution’s ability to deliver automated endpoint management and provide great service to end users while keeping costs down, maintaining compliance, and mitigating risk. With BMC Helix Client Management, the IT organization now has insight into the devices deployed to “work-from-home” employees and is able to reduce risk exposure to those assets and the network by securely patching third-party software. The automated deployment, vulnerability management, patching, and policy compliance provided by BMC Helix Client Management allows Dudley Group NHS to meet CareCERT SLA standards set by NHS Digital.

Business Impact

With BMC Helix Client Management, Dudley Group NHS has seen immediate improvements to productivity and user satisfaction:

• The solution took just 24 hours to implement and 30 days to deploy across the enterprise.
• The Trust’s IT group was able to build over 650 laptops for remote workers in just 5 days with only 2 engineers as they fully automated the process.
• IT patched its enterprise PDF application on 2,643 devices in just 10 minutes—previously, this would have taken about 200 hours.
• With faster software deployments, problems are also resolved more quickly, saving the Trust the equivalent of several days per month.
• The IT organization reports drastically reduced support calls due to the solution’s communication features, and much faster resolution of incidents, including first call resolution rates and mean time to repair (MTTR).