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LANDesk Success Story: Georgia Institute of Technology
Creating Time for IT Innovation |
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Situated in the heart of Atlanta, the Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the top research
universities in the United States. Distinguished by its commitment to improving the human
condition through advanced science and technology, Georgia Tech is consistently the only
technological university ranked in U.S. News & World Report’s listing of America’s top 10
public universities. Its more than 900 full-time instructional faculty and staff constantly strive
to create an innovative intellectual environment for its more than 18,000 undergraduate and
graduate students. |
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Doing More with Less
The mission of the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at Georgia Tech is to support
and provide the academic units at the university with the technology tools they need to
teach and to further their research initiatives. One of the school’s single greatest challenges
in achieving this is, as a public university, it has limited funding. “If the school has budget
cuts, IT is the first place they look to reduce, in spite of our increasing workload,” says
Robert Riding, systems support specialist at Georgia Tech. “We needed a solution that
would let us do more with less, automating much of what we do.” The automation inherent
to LANDesk® Management Suite enabled Georgia Tech OIT to perform management tasks
on hundreds of machines without ever having to physically visit or touch those machines.
Hands-off Provisioning
At the end of each semester, every lab across campus needs to have its computers reimaged
to clean off anything left behind by students, and to make sure they are properly
configured with the right applications and system patches. The university had been using
an alternative that required someone to physically manage the process at each lab. “With
our previous imaging solution we had to have people stay on campus all weekend to
babysit the process,” Riding says. “We needed a solution that would allow us to automate
this task.”
The imaging capabilities in LANDesk® Management Suite provide simplified and
automated provisioning. Also, since Georgia Tech can leverage LANDesk® automated
software deployment as part of its provisioning process, it has simplified its image library
management and reduced deployment times.
“By being able to push out a much leaner base image, we can follow up with software
package deployments,” Riding says. “As a result, we don’t have to push everything out in
one big chunk. Combining this with the use of multicast technology is much kinder to
our network and speeds up the process by about 20 to 30 percent.” |
Simplified Software and Patch Deployment
In addition to its regular provisioning activities, the university also uses the software
deployment capabilities in LANDesk® Management Suite to give some groups of users
applications that are not part of its standard library.“Instead of visiting each machine
when installing software,” Riding says, “now I simply right-click on a task, drag a machine
down to it, and tell it to start now. Ten minutes later, it’s installed. It saves us an enormous
amount of time, especially if we’re doing wide-scale deployments, which we’ll typically
schedule to happen overnight when nobody’s here.”
LANDesk Management Suite and LANDesk® Patch Manager similarly automate
Georgia Tech’s patch management processes as well. “Since we’re a public university,
our IP addresses are not private,” Riding says. “As a result, we get about three
million Internet attacks a day. So, being able to make sure we’re protected against known
vulnerabilities is extremely critical to us.”
Whenever new patches become available from Microsoft, LANDesk Patch Manager
automates much of the patch management process for Georgia Tech.
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Business Needs
- Be able to support the growing
IT needs of the university
with fewer esources.
Solution
- LANDesk® Management Suite
- LANDesk® Patch Manager
Business Benefits
- Eliminated the need to manually
provision machines and sped
up overall provisioning time
by 20 to 30 percent.
- Reduced the time to patch machines
from 30 days to four days, with
the ability to quickly verify whether
all machines were patched.
- Saved 55 minutes for the majority
of help desk calls by eliminating
the need for desk-side visits.
- Cut annual inventory gathering efforts
from three months to 16 days.
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“We test the patches
on Tuesday, apply them on Wednesday, and finish up on Friday any that might have been
missed. Instead of taking a month, in four days we’re done,” Riding says.
Key to the patch management process is the LANDesk reporting capability that lets the
university verify that all the appropriate machines have been patched. “Reporting lets us
quickly identify any patches that are missing,” Riding adds.
Happy and Productive Users
One of the other valuable benefits that LANDesk® Management Suite brings Georgia
Tech is its ability to remote control users’ machines, enabling its IT staff to support a large
number of distributed users in different schools and buildings spread across campus. “We
no longer have to run to people’s offices and take an hour to fix a five-minute problem,”
Riding says. “Now we can remote in, instantly see what they’re seeing on their desktop,
make a few mouse clicks and its fixed. Instead of going from place to place troubleshooting
problems, this capacity allows us to be much more productive.”
LANDesk Management Suite also helps the university in the area of inventory
management. “Since we’re a state institution, we have to keep track of all of our
equipment,” Riding says. “We now have at-a-glance visibility so we can see where all
my machines are and what they have on them, reducing our inventorytime from three
months to 16 days.”
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Time for Proactive Innovation
Overall the greatest benefit that LANDesk® Management Suite provides Georgia Tech is
the timesavings it brings to the Office of Information Technology. “We now have the time
we need to be more proactive and innovative,” Riding says. “It’s important that we have a
single solution that adds value and brings automation to everything we do, allowing us to
easily get the work done we need to do.”
“It’s important that we have a
single solution that adds value and
brings automation to everything
we do, allowing us to easily get
the work done we need to do.”
— Robert Riding
Systems Support Specialist
Georgia Institute of Technology |
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“It’s important that we have a
single solution that adds value and
brings automation to everything
we do, allowing us to easily get
the work done we need to do.”
— Robert Riding
Systems Support Specialist
Georgia Institute of Technology |
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 Georgia Tech PDF File |
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affiliated companies- in the United States and/or other countries.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Each customer’s results may vary based on its unique set of facts and circumstances.
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