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Meeting the Changing Support Needs of the University Across Five Campuses and Internationally
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Education
Use Cases
- Remote Collaboration
Services
- System Integration
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
The University for the Creative Arts (UCA) was facing challenges around remote support on both the business and technical sides. The biggest challenge was supporting an increasing number of staff working remotely and travelling internationally as part of the University’s recruitment and internationalisation strategies. Together with the growing number of different devices being used by staff connecting to the network, this placed new challenges on the University’s service desk and support teams when it came to dealing with requests. UCA has a diverse IT environment to support, incorporating more than 1,500 Apple desktops and laptops; more than 1,450 Windows-based desktops and laptops; a variety of mobile devices, including iPads and BlackBerry devices; and an increasing number of servers, switches and wireless access points. On top of this, there is demand to support mobile devices as BYOD (bring your own device) becomes more popular at UCA.
About The Customer
The University for the Creative Arts (UCA) is a specialist university formed to foster a unique community for its students around subjects including fine art, digital media, journalism, animation, crafts, fashion and photography. UCA has five campuses and several annex sites across the South-East of England, including Chatham Historical Dockyards and Maidstone TV Studios. A small IT support team provides in-house IT support to more than 800 staff and 6,500 students at UCA. James Davies, IT Customer Services Manager at UCA, was responsible for evaluating the University’s approach towards remote support services and decided to look for alternatives to the existing methods and tools following discussions with senior management.
The Solution
The evaluation phase led to Davies and Tempest narrowing down the potential choice of solutions to those based on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model or a remote support appliance. “As Bomgar’s appliance is hosted within our network, the amount of control over access levels was an immediate advantage as this made for easy, secure integration into Active Directory. When we looked at the cloud-based and SaaS options, there wasn’t the same level of granular control and security available, and they were also reliant on the reliability of the vendor’s systems,” commented Davies. “Finally, the ability to support Macs, Windows PCs, tablets and other devices through one, centralised solution made Bomgar the obvious choice.” Following the evaluation, the team at UCA bought a Bomgar B200 appliance and installed it within the University’s data centre. The Enterprise version of the Bomgar solution includes an integration with Intel vPro, which allows the IT support teams to control vPro-enabled devices below the operating system. This means that UCA IT staff can deal with complex issues affecting the underlying PC hardware, such as BIOS changes and hardware diagnostics without having to be physically in front of the machine.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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