Situation

When the foundation was looking to roll out additional services to support human resources and 'self-service' activities, they realised that they needed more visibility into their current managed network. “The only way to deliver the new services was to make sure we knew what was happening across our environment so we could more effectively manage outcomes for end users" says Sanders.

Endeavour’s current level of network monitoring, while providing a good indication of traffic levels, was historical in focus and did not support real time decision-making.

“The only data we could see across our network was usage. We needed to go from a managed network to another level," Sanders explains.

Solution

An inability to diagnose issues would on occasion result in Endeavour’s helpdesk taking calls which they could not resolve due of a lack of information. With customer service a key priority this was an issue Sanders was keen to rectify.

“We needed a solution that would allow us to strike off any noticeable problems upfront so we could focus on identifying the real issue, which would lead to better customer satisfaction at the end of the day.”

On the advice of Brennan IT, Endeavour deployed SecureView, a comprehensive diagnostic tool specifically built for organisations that have a private IP network. SecureView provides a real time view of data network traffic right down to a PC level.

"The tool provides complete visibility across our network allowing us to identify different protocols and traffic flows happening between remote sites and the data centre, which in turn allows us to quickly locate potential problems and more effectively address them,” said Sanders.

Discerning between benign and malign activity was the crucial benefit of SecureView. "From a service delivery perspective we really needed to ensure that if there was an issue reported to our helpdesk, we could drill down and quickly find out what was going on," he says. "It could be anything from somebody outside of our Citrix environment downloading a file from the central storage which can bring down the site, to some rogue program, which most people and networks would know doesn't take much to take a network down. If you don't know what's happening out there then you're in the dark."

Benefits

The foundation has already seen the value SecureView can offer to their operations, Sanders elaborates. " There was a PC with a virus that triggered all sorts of issues across the network and with SecureView we were able to quickly identify the issue and respond before the problem got out of hand. From a customer service perspective, we are able to offer a better experience, by being able to quickly and effectively respond to users calls.”

As a tool, SecureView has helped identify problems so the team can come up with effective solutions. "When you're problem solving it's very important to be able to logically go through and follow steps," say Sanders, noting that before SecureView they only had 'half the story'. "With this facility, now we can eliminate the obvious things and drill down into detail. It's just more effective from the helpdesk point of view."