Server and Client Management, Messaging Security, and Data Protection, IT Compliance

Executive Summary

Overview
Celebrating its centennial in 2007, Memorial Hermann Healthcare System is a large, integrated healthcare system that includes 11 hospitals, 27 sports medicine & rehabilitation centers, 3 heart & vascular institutes, 3 managed acute care hospitals, 1 retirement/nursing center, 21 imaging centers, 3 breast centers, 12 diagnostic laboratories, 1 substance abuse treatment facility, and 1 home health agency located throughout the Houston, Texas, community. This network of locations includes 20,000 employees and is supported by an Information System Department (ISD) full-time staff of 475. The IT environment contains more than 1,100 data center servers and approximately 18,000 client endpoints used by employees, most of whom are in the corporate office, as well as consultants and specialists located at the hospitals and medical centers.

Barriers
Memorial Hermann’s widely distributed network of locations requires rapid, secure access to patient records and consumable data to enhance patient care. Network clients are diverse, ranging from standard desktops and laptops to “WOWs” (wireless PCs on wheels), with the number of client workstations growing at an annual rate of almost 15 percent over the last six years. Despite this growth, the ISD staff remained constant, managing more endpoints, both at the client and in the data center without additional headcount. The challenges included patch management, provisioning of new clients and servers, and re-imaging existing clients and servers. Data storage and backup volumes were also growing at similar rates to network systems, creating operational efficiency challenges. In addition, messaging security was a growing issue, with spam—and in some cases viruses—clogging Microsoft Exchange servers and employee inboxes and consuming valuable storage at a tune of 200 gigabytes of per month.

The Solution
To address these challenges, the ISD team at Memorial Hermann made a strategic decision in 2001 to invest in IT to position the healthcare system as an innovator in the industry. As part of this decision, Memorial Hermann turned to Symantec for assistance on several fronts. First, in order improve backup success rates and improve operational efficiencies, the ISD team standardized backup and recovery for Microsoft Windows-based systems on Veritas NetBackup in 2001. In 2008, as the data center environment had grown in complexity, the team opted to expand its standardization for nearly all backup- and-recovery operations on NetBackup—encompassing UNIX-, Linux-, and Microsoft Windows-based systems. Following this, they upgraded to NetBackup 6.5 and added NetBackup Media Server Encryption Option in order to ensure the security and privacy of data in transit via encryption. For the management of endpoints, both on the client and in the data center, the ISD team rolled out Altiris Client Management Suite and Altiris Server Management Suite in 2004. Finally, the ISD team implemented Symantec Brightmail Gateway, which allows them to block viruses and spam at the gateway. For help deploying these different solutions, the Memorial Hermann team engaged Symantec Consulting Services on several occasions and leveraged training from Symantec Education Services.

Benefits
A Total Operational & Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group found the different solutions from Symantec are producing tangible business value for Memorial Hermann in the following areas during the timeframe of January 2001 to December 2009:

• Spam Filtering Labor Productivity Gains: $31.6 million in IT and employee labor productivity gains from August 2006 through December 2009 by deploying Symantec Brightmail Gateway.
• Backup Labor Productivity Gains and Cost Avoidance: $1,765,886 in ISD labor cost avoidance and productivity gains from January 2001 through December 2009 by consolidating backup-and-recovery operations onto Veritas NetBackup.
• Client Endpoint Management Productivity Gains: $648,036 in realized and projected productivity gains through the use of Altiris Client Management Suite to image and reimage client workstations and produce reports from August 2004 through December 2009.
• Client and Server Patch Management Labor Productivity Gains: $287,675 in total labor productivity gains from August 2004 through December 2009 through improved patch management using Altiris Client Management Suite and Altiris Server Management Suite.
• Server Provisioning and Reimaging Labor Productivity Gains: $161,255 in ISD labor productivity gains through faster reimaging of servers and provisioning of new servers using Altiris Server Management Suite from August 2004 through December 2009.
• Storage Space Cost Avoidance: $74,311 in storage cost avoidance by eliminating spam emails before they enter the environment from August 2006 through December 2009.

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