Standardization, IT Compliance, Security Management, Backup and Restore, and High Availability, Data Center

Executive Summary

Overview
Texas Children’s Hospital is an internationally recognized full-care pediatric hospital located in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas. The hospital’s medical staff consists of more than 1,580 primary-care physicians, pediatric subspecialists, and dentists, complemented by a dedicated, highly skilled nursing and support staff of more than 6,100 employees. The hospital’s 300-person IT department is responsible for supporting the various Texas Children’s Hospital’s business entities, biomedical engineering services, and business services with a network infrastructure that is robust, reliable, and safe from all attacks and natural disasters.

Barriers
The IT department at Texas Children’s Hospital has faced significant barriers over the past decade that introduced both cost and risks into the IT environment. First, the IT environment had to be secure and protected from attack, even to the level of the endpoint, and managed from a centralized console. Second, changes in healthcare and government regulations demanded regular and detailed security and compliance reporting. Third, as part of its deployment of Epic software for healthcare information and workflow management and the next-generation Oracle PeopleSoft upgrade, the Texas Children’s Hospital team sought to standardize data center infrastructure software for enhanced availability, improved labor productivity, and lower costs. Finally, the team wanted to centralize management of the desktop and laptop environments for greater flexibility, enhanced security, and streamlined efficiencies.

The Solution
Texas Children’s Hospital’s relationship with Symantec began in 1999 with the deployment of Symantec AntiVirus on all of its desktop systems. The hospital subsequently installed Symantec Ghost Solution Suite in the data center to image new systems and re-image corrupt systems. The IT team also deployed Veritas NetBackup for centralized backup and restore of their Microsoft Windows-based environment.

Seeking to address regulatory compliance requirements and streamline security management, Texas Children’s Hospital engaged Symantec Residency Services in 2005 to help its IT staff to roll out and integrate Symantec Security Information Manager and Symantec Enterprise Security Manager. Texas Children’s Hospital also subscribed to the Symantec DeepSight Threat Management System to receive proactive security updates.

In early 2006, Texas Children’s Hospital embarked on a 24-month initiative to roll out Epic software, which would help the hospital enhance medical service through better record keeping and improved clinical communications. The IT staff engaged Symantec Consulting Services for help in architecting and implementing components of the data center software infrastructure. The different software components from Symantec included Veritas NetBackup for standardized backup and restore, Veritas Cluster Server for high availability clustering, Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System for centralized management of the clustered environment, and Veritas Storage Foundation for volume and file system management.
Overlapping with the Epic deployment, Texas Children’s Hospital embarked on a comprehensive next generation Oracle PeopleSoft infrastructure deployment in 2007 that leveraged some of the same Symantec software components involved in the Epic software implementation, as well as Symantec Consulting Services for architecture design and deployment assistance.

Benefits
A Total Operational & Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group found the different solutions from Symantec are driving more than $11.0 million in realized and projected business value in labor productivity gains, cost savings, and cost avoidance, for Texas Children’s Hospital. The timeframe for analysis ranges from January 2001 through December 2009.

• Security Breach Remediation Cost Avoidance: $1,571,245 in security breach remediation as a result of endpoint hardening from July 2005 through December 2009
• Compliance Reporting Labor Savings: $354,440 in labor productivity gains by automating the generation of compliance reports from 2006 through 2009
• PC Provisioning and Lifecycle Management Savings: $1,741,100 in labor savings related to management of existing PCs and in provisioning new PCs from 2003 through 2009
• Server Provisioning Labor Savings: $261,235 in labor savings due to an improved process to provision new servers from 2004 through 2009
• Backup-and-Restore Labor Cost Avoidance: $3,443,779 in labor cost avoidance through standardizing data backup across both the Microsoft Windows and UNIX environments from 2001 through 2009
• Backup Time and Troubleshooting Labor Savings: $773,045 in labor savings by reducing the number and types of backup jobs performed and improving the quality of the backups, resulting in a reduction in troubleshooting time from 2006 through 2009
• High Availability Productivity Gains and Savings: $3,314,897 in labor productivity gains and reductions in overstock expenses due to high availability of business applications

For more information on Alchemy Group or to download this document, go to http://www.alchemygroupinc.com/category/research/bva/