References
"Since implementation, we have been able to greatly simplify many of our tasks."
Medicover
Reference
Medicover was founded in Sweden in 1995 and has since established itself as one of the leading international service providers for medical and diagnostic care. In Poland, the Medicover Group operates numerous medical centers, hospitals, infertility clinics, mental health centers, opticians and fitness clubs with over 34,000 employees. The coordination effort involved is high, and the IT systems and organizational structures used to manage the company's numerous sites are correspondingly complex.
Andrzej Sikorski heads the Maintenance and IT Systems department. Together with 17 colleagues and 30 service desk staff, he looks after almost 6,000 workstations, consisting of laptops and desktop PCs, spread across 225 sites throughout Poland. One challenge here is the 2,500 laptops that have to work outside the corporate network via VPN, but in some cases also without contact to the corporate network – without jeopardizing the security of the entire network.
Low-level solutions not enough
"In the beginning, we relied primarily on the available tools from Microsoft to manage our IT – that is, we mainly implemented changes via group policies objects. Support was done via consoles for antivirus systems, through which we could run scripts remotely. Inventory was handled by free tools like GLPI," explains Andrzej Sikorski.
"As the company grew and the number of devices increased, this low-level solution simply wasn't practical. In particular, the inertia of group policies was a problem: you didn't know at all when and if a process had been successful. The existing solution was therefore far too unreliable for us, and the lack of reporting also made it too insecure."
baramundi as a better alternative
"We looked at a whole range of possible alternatives with our IT partner IntraCARE and weighed up the respective advantages and disadvantages. In the end, however, we were convinced by the Management Suite from baramundi: Both the short implementation time, the large number of possible modules, and the hardware requirements that were favorable for us were exactly what we needed. We have now been using baramundi since June 2019. Since then, the number of districts covered with baramundi has been steadily increasing."
Numerous tasks simplified
"Since implementation, we have been able to greatly simplify many of our tasks. For example, we now use baramundi Automation Studio to perform very complex software installations automatically, even if this requires input outside the installer. The baramundi Remote Gateway has proven particularly useful for ensuring support and an appropriate level of security for laptops used outside the company network," Andrzej Sikorski continued.
"With the help of bMS, we were able to implement the major migration from Windows 7 to 10 in a very short time. Since then, we have been using the tool not only for new software and its updates, but also to distribute Microsoft's monthly security updates. With it, it is now very easy to install fully configured operating systems, including all required applications, on new workstations."
One of the biggest advantages for us is now being able to perform software installations remotely on an ad hoc basis.
Andrzej Sikorski , Heads the Maintenance and IT Systems department at Medicover
“The baramundi solution also allows us to specifically control the successive versions of Microsoft security updates. In addition, the clear console makes it much easier and faster to monitor the security status and display it in reports. We now finally have immediate feedback on whether our tasks have been successfully implemented. Overall, everything is now much faster with baramundi: be it the implementation of workstation upgrades or the preparation of images for the operating system installation."
Outlook
"Because of the large number of workstations, almost every implementation of new applications and configurations is very time-consuming. To meet the challenge of upcoming operating system upgrades, we are currently planning a pilot project to introduce Windows Autopilot with baramundi. In the future, this will allow us to send our end users their hardware directly from the dealer and have it automatically configured by itself during the first start-up. We are already looking forward to the upcoming innovations that will make our work even more efficient."
