ManageSoft wins Sunshine Coast Uni security patch deal

Stan Beer
Friday, 03 June 2005 10:12

IT Industry - Development

The University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) has selected the ManageSoft software management suite to automate its security patch management, software deployment and IT business intelligence.

By automating these time-consuming, labour intensive IT functions, USC hopes to improve IT service levels and simplify IT management as it prepares for future growth.

"We're excited about starting the implementation with the ManageSoft team
next month. USC has about 1000 PCs, laptops and mobile devices to manage.
These machines are spread over four locations, including the main campus,
two remote research stations on Fraser Island and an office in Brisbane.
So, manual procedures to track IT assets, and deploy software and security
patches, have been difficult and costly.  The automated tools from
ManageSoft will streamline our processes and make our IT department's job
much simpler, so we can more responsive to students' and teachers' needs.
Automating these IT processes also prepares us for continuing expansion,"
said Perry Dixon, Computer and Media Services team leader, USC.

According to Dixon, many benefits will stem from investing in the
ManageSoft software management suite.  "We have a centralised IT model with
30 staff dedicated to maintaining the university's IT systems.  But with
the number of vulnerabilities increasing, manually deploying patches is
slow and ineffective.  We needed an automated solution and we were
particularly impressed with the self-healing feature that ManageSoft
offers. This means, that even if no patch is available, we can still run a
state-check that initiates each of our machines to check itself against the
desired state or policy.  If something doesn't match up, the machine
self-heals by re-downloading missing components and settings, returning the
machine to the desired state with the smallest possible bandwidth impact.
This will let us maintain a temporary level of service until a patch is
deployed.

"IT business intelligence is also important to our operations because it
simplifies our IT asset tracking and the monitoring of our IT environment.
And, the ManageSoft software deployment solution will help us save a lot of
time and effort by letting us deploy and remove software from a central
location.  This means that our IT team won't have to manually reconfigure
PCs when teaching requirements, timetables and rooms change.  It also means
we will provide better service to our students and staff because downtime
is significantly reduced," said Dixon.