Case Study: EvensonBest
The Challenges
“In these tough economic times, we needed to find a way to get better control of our desktop
operating environment and to reduce resolution times without adding additional IT staff.
Viewfinity lets us do this for both stationary and mobile users,” says Martin Silverman,
IT Director for EvensonBest. “The Privilege Management features allow us the granularity that
we need to lock down systems without impeding work-flow, and the ability to rollback systems to a
working state (on the fly) is fantastic” Silverman said.”
EvensonBest prides itself on an unparalleled reputation for honesty, integrity,
and excellence in furniture sales and service, and has set the standard by which all contract
furniture distributors are measured. EvensonBest’s dedication to proving excellence is exhibited
in its own IT group which is responsible for
managing endpoints for a highly mobile, worldwide workforce.
In the past, it was common for EvensonBest to have 75% of users in a building or group of buildings,
each with dedicated technical support assigned to them. These days, 75% of EvensonBest’s users
are mobile with laptops, thus a different way to provide support is required. Mobile computers need
to constantly connect back to EvensonBest through various high-speed connections including Public
WIFI in hotels, airports, etc. These public WIFI connections bring about an additional layer of
risk from man-in-the-middle attacks, malware and information theft strikes.
To stop these incidents, the IT group started locking down the computers so that only approved
applications could run to protect against zero-day attacks. They also blocked new software installations
to protect against malware.
The Solution
Viewfinity’s Systems Management enables EvensonBest’s technicians to support endpoints from the Internet.
This is important as the user can be situated in Washington, Dubai, or anywhere,
and the technician is using the internet to reach the endpoint and provide service,
regardless of location, easily and painlessly.
Using Viewfinity’s Privilege Management, EvensonBest’s IT group has the ability to create policies that
elevate privileges for the furniture catalog application so that end users have the appropriate administrative
rights to install their own catalog. Policies are deployed automatically and immediately propagate.
The IT group can run reports to confirm which policies were delivered and activated.
The Privilege Management feature also allows users to do administrative tasks that they wouldn’t
otherwise be able to do, such as hard drive defragmentation, printer installs, ActiveX installs,
power setting changes and other selective tasks.
The Results
Where custom furniture configuration and top-rate customer service are the cornerstones of our business,
it is imperative that sales and project management personnel are working with the latest version of the
catalog to ensure accurate pricing and customer choices.
“CAP updates are our bread and butter. If we cannot effective specify parts and pricing,
this hurts our business. It is absolutely vital to our business that all employees are working with the
most recent catalog version,” says Martin Silverman, Director of IT for EvensonBest.
“Using the Viewfinity Elevate Privileges and Audit Reporting capabilities, locked down users have
catalog update ability once again and we are able to validate that all users have installed the latest catalog.
There are other products that do all the combined things that Viewfinity does
but they are not all available in one product. We like the single pane of glass Viewfinity offers.”
The IT group has set high standards for itself. The end-users can now expect that issues will be resolved
within 15-20 minutes. In fact, EvensonBest’s IT group prides itself on the users perception that
their laptops and desktops will always be operational, just like dial-tone, or electricity.
Tools like Viewfinity are crucial to providing this level of service. With the mobility reach
that Viewfinity affords us, our technicians have become accustomed to monitoring and supporting hundreds
of mobile users from a single location, thus achieving previously unheard of levels of productivity.
Having cloud-based support through a cloud-hosted offering is a bonus in many ways.
We no longer need to worry about updating and maintaining dedicated servers for this system.
Also, Viewfinity integrates perfectly with our disaster recovery plan because in a disaster
1) all end users will be mobile; and 2) we will have less access to support staff, thus a smaller
number of IT staff will have to do more over a geographically disbursed endpoint situation.
Viewfinity makes this possible.