Centralization and control: the key to effective workstation management

How we solved the needs of a banking group with branches and employees spread across the territory

A major Italian banking group, partly as a result of changed corporate structures and new controlling interests, saw an increase in the number of workstations to be managed. With several branches and more than 500 employees spread across the territory, the 1000 machines (PCs and servers) to be managed required an onerous commitment from the IT staff in terms of inventory and software distribution.

These activities impacted on management, in particular on issues such as:

• Asset Management: without up-to-date inventories on the devices and their HW and SW content, it was more difficult to manage the asset life cycle and consequently the assignments, decommissioning, linking with other objects (e.g. purchase contracts) or with the ITSM part (e.g. tracking the number of incidents that occurred on that asset). Management was mainly related to devices (PCs and servers), but could be extended to more types of IT assets (telephones, printers, peripherals, switch devices, etc.).
• Security: the lack of control over devices - especially if mobile - with information on where they are, what is installed and the level of vulnerability, increases the risk of security exposures. Centralisation favours standardisation, as it allows updates to be inventoried and distributed consistently according to the dictates of internet security and corporate policies.
• Operational management: the operational management of computers and servers was time-consuming for the staff, who had to intervene branch by branch. This is the case, for example, with the migration of operating systems (e.g. from Windows 7 to Windows 10).

How we solved

At WEGG, we deal with Workplace Management, i.e. we enable our customers to centrally manage any device that connects to the corporate network, eliminating the critical issues related to manual provisioning or provisioning across multiple management systems (e.g. different for mobile devices).

We therefore allow the uniform and automated distribution of applications and related patches from a single control point, from which you can have full visibility over your IT environment. For the banking group in question, we followed a Workplace Management project (endpoint management + patch management) with the technology of our partner Ivanti (available both on-premise and in the cloud). Thanks to our assessment of analysis and identification of the most suitable technology, implementation and configuration, our client can now:

• centrally manage HW and SW inventorying.
• enable remote control functions (in integration with ITSM tools) and thus can more easily provide support to users
• automate application provisioning and patch distribution

With regard to OS provisioning, we enabled Windows zero-touch migrations (requiring no user intervention): from headquarters, the Windows package was automatically distributed to all branches. This migration was preceded by an analysis of the process flow that would take PCs from Windows 7 (no longer supported) to Windows 10. We identified three types of scenarios, with the corresponding cost analysis:

• the replacement of the entire PC (in case of obsolescence)
• "in-place" updates
• installation-type updates

Therefore, the migration also turned out to be an opportunity to update its fleet, in case of obsolete or inadequate devices.

Internal promotion

In our migration projects, we also consider internal promotion indispensable. It is one of the ITIL guiding principles: "Collaborate and promote visibility". For another major bank that needed to migrate its operating systems to Windows10 within a tight timeframe, we created a story behind the migration to give the project visibility and get people to collaborate.

The operation took place at night and in an automated manner without causing any inconvenience, but in preparation for this, staff had to save in a folder everything they wanted to take to the new PC and leave the device switched on and in the office. IT communication revolved around the theme of "moving into the future": by means of stickers, videos, and internal promotional activities, internal publicity brought light to an IT activity often seen as inconvenient and aroused much interest.

The result was an increased awareness on the part of users of the important upgrade work carried out by the IT team.