Tampa General Hospital is using agentless IT asset management technology, in a strict management structure, to help keep its network healthy.
Balaji
Ramadoss has more than 8,000 IP assets to account for, but, unlike most of his
peers, keeping track is literally a matter of life and death.
IT asset
management, or ITAM, is a critical task in most large organizations. Administrators
need a way to account for every piece of hardware on their network, ensure that
all software is properly licensed, identify rogue devices and applications, and
address potential security vulnerabilities.
ITAM
applications can alleviate the burden of these tasks, but most ITAM
applications adversely affect network performance when they are doing their
census. And sluggish performance is simply not acceptable when the network in
question is responsible for maintaining life-saving equipment at peak operating
efficiency.
As the
director for IT and standards at Tampa General Hospital, Ramadoss is responsible
for ensuring that every piece of hardware is properly accounted for, as well as
in compliance with regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act).
All 120
members of Ramadoss' team are also responsible for security-something he was
shocked to discover is not the case with his peers. "Everyone [in IT] has to be
responsible for security," he said.
Ramadoss
and his team identified the need for an ITAM solution, but decided to go with
an agentless system that would not be a drain on the network.
They
ultimately decided on SecureFusion, an agentless IT application suite from
Gideon Technologies. Ramadoss began implementing SecureFusion across the rest
of his network in July 2008 as part of a phased implementation process that will
encompass hardware and software asset discovery, network drive security, policy
enforcement, configuration management, and vulnerability management.
The
hospital runs Dell equipment in a Windows environment and is investing heavily
in virtualization technology from VMware.
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