Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center Wins Microsoft Innovator Award for Implementing Avatier's Trusted Enterprise Manager to Simplify Migration to Active Directory
The first solution that allows organizations to truly mimic Windows 2000 capabilities while preparing for and facilitating a smooth migration to Active Directory.
Microsoft Decisions Conference, Chicago, IL, May 8, 2002 — Avatier Corporation, a leading provider of award winning Microsoft-centric enterprise, administration, security and productivity applications, today announced that Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (WFUBMC), one of the nation's preeminent academic medical centers, has won the Microsoft Decision Conference’s Innovator Award for the successful implementation of Avatier’s Trusted Enterprise Manager (TEM)™. Using TEM, WFUBMC migrated over 10,000 active Windows NT accounts and 7,000 Global groups to Active Directory. TEM is enabling WFUBMC to leverage investments in its existing Windows NT infrastructure and cost-effectively strengthen security, reduce operating costs and accelerate migration to Active Directory. The award will be given on May 8th at the Microsoft Decisions Conference taking place in Chicago, IL, May 8-10, 2002. “When migrating to Active Directory, the right management tool is essential both to assure that you are moving forward with a clean environment as well as making the actual transition as efficient as possible,” said Kamie Bullins, senior network systems analyst at WFUBMC. “Avatier was able to help us with all of our issues and was always available and ready to assist us when we needed them. We have been very pleased with their product and feel confident that with TEM we will continue to be successful in meeting the needs of our growing community.”
“TEM is the first solution that allows organizations currently caught in a mix-mode environment to begin managing their network as if it was already converted to Native mode Active Directory,” said Nelson Cicchitto, president and CEO of Avatier Corporation. “We are proud to be a part of WFUBMC’s success in winning the Windows Innovator Award.”
Business Challenges
WFUBMC provides critical patient care, community healthcare support and the benefits of a full-time teaching hospital to hundreds of thousands of patients and staff along the Central East Coast. With over 20 subsidiary or affiliate hospitals and 87 satellite clinics throughout its 26-county region, WFUBMC has a highly distributed environment. This environment required WFUBMC to give a large number of support staff permission to control user accounts that exceeded their level of authority, creating a hole in the security structure and a proliferation of non-standard users and groups. The recent implementation of HIPPA regulations further accelerated the medical center’s need for a centrally managed and more secure environment.
Needs Met with Avatier’s TEM
After testing the software in their lab environment, WFUBMC selected Avatier’s TEM based on its ability to increase administrator productivity and accountability, give greater network security and reduce administration costs. TEM allowed the WFUBMC staff to have a unified view of their entire user environment in a single management interface. Staff could view comprehensive displays of all user and group attributes in an active management tool and make mass updates in real-time to quickly implement standards on their sprawling network.
TEM ‘s Admin-by-Report feature enabled WFUBMC to run reports and see the properties of user accounts and groups including last logon and logoff and accounts with non-conforming security vulnerabilities. WFUBMC was able to delete nearly 3,000 accounts that had not been used in over 90 days, as well as hundreds of groups that were no longer needed.
Once the initial cleanup and standardization was performed, the network administration model was reevaluated and optimized by using the reversible and audited delegation model in TEM. TEM allowed WFUBMC to eliminate unsecured operator accounts and most administration accounts in favor of Trusted Managers who’s scope and authority are specifically limited to the power and access they need to perform their jobs. The real-time auditing tools in TEM gave WFUBMC’s IT staff the ability to see who was doing what to whom and when. When coupled with the extensive task automation in TEM, the Trusted Manager was able to reduce the 41-step user creation process to three steps while enforcing naming conventions and standards. The account unlock and password reset process was reduced to one mouse click and able to be delegated safely to the least technical department administrator.
The next step for WFUBMC was to replace existing Microsoft NT servers with Windows 2000 servers. TEM is the first solution that allows organizations to truly mimic Windows 2000 capabilities while preparing for and facilitating a smooth migration to Active Directory. TEM is enabling WFUBMC to simultaneously manage the NT4 and Active Directory environment, streamlining the migration preparation process. As the user population is moved over to the Active Directory structure their day to day needs can still be met by the same Trusted Managers, in the same role, using the same tools that supported them in their NT4 world.
About Avatier’s Total Enterprise Manager (TEM)
TEM provides advanced task automation, simplified role-based delegation, real-time auditing, powerful policy-based management, and administration-enabled reporting for distributed Microsoft Windows NT/2000/Exchange environments. TEM’s One Touch Administration™ empowers IT managers to automate inherently difficult or time-consuming administrative tasks, such as new user creation, and increase administrator productivity. Security is enhanced with TEM’s integrated and reporting ability that tracks employee and password logon properties and categorically audits and reports on all modifications made to users, computers and groups. TEM’s Directory Shadow Repository (DSR)™ pre-populates Active Directory user properties with Microsoft Exchange data, stores the properties and then enables drag and drop capabilities at the time of migration. TEM gives organizations the power to mimic, migrate, manage and secure Window’s NT, 2000, Exchange and Terminal Services.
About Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (WFUBMC), one of the nation’s preeminent academic medical centers, is an integrated health care system that operates 1,291 acute care, rehabilitation and long-term care beds, outpatient services, and community health and information centers. It provides a continuum of care that includes primary care centers, outpatient rehabilitation, dialysis centers, home health care, and long-term nursing centers. Although its primary service area is a 26-county region in northwest North Carolina and southwest Virginia, WFUBMC sees patients from across the state and nation and around the world. Its component institutions are Wake Forest University Health Sciences and North Carolina Baptist Hospitals, Inc.