Case Study: Movado Group Inc.
Movado Group Inc. is a premiere watchmaker that designs, manufactures, and distributes watches for nine of the best recognized brands. Movado Group Inc. is headquartered in New Jersey and Switzerland and has multiple sales and distribution offices around the world. In total, Movado Group employs over 1300 employees.
The focus and drive of the organization is to always implement best practices to proactively protect and preserve the prestige of the Movado Group organization. The workforce is comprised of over 1100 endpoints of which 60% are desktops and 40% are laptops. These Windows-based endpoints run on average about 30 plus applications, of which a few are custom applications. Approximately 10% of the staff is made up of mobile workers and another 30% work in their retail stores. Movado Group also rolled out Viewfinity as a part of VMware’s View VDI so they could apply privileges to virtual desktop images operating in persistent and non-persistent pool models.
The Challenges
“Within a month of rolling out Viewfinity, there has been a complete eradication of nuisance calls. In the two major primary sites in the US, there are about 250 employees at each and two IT help desk employees. With a ratio of about 100:1, being able to eliminate the nuisance calls has had a big impact on the overall productivity of the Movado Group workforce.” says Steve Welgoss, Desktop Services Manager for Movado Group.
Movado Group’s IT group was challenged with a daily influx of support calls to the IT Help Desk on issues that affected PC performance and reliability. The issues dealt with ranged from adware/spyware, toolbars being installed that came with pop-ups, the changing of system settings that caused performance degradation and in some cases the total failure of applications as well as other debilitating user-caused circumstances. To eliminate these errors and to better secure its endpoints, Movado Group removed administrator rights as a whole. In doing so, they were faced with situations where employees needed administrator rights to install and/or execute certain applications, execute certain system functions and to install printers. Thus, employees had to wait for IT support to make a desk-side visit to fix the problem, which negatively impacted productivity, was costly and time consuming. The IT group knew locking down its endpoints was the right thing to do, but they needed the ability to manage and control the desktop environment more efficiently.
The Solution
Viewfinity Privilege Management helped us solve these challenges. We are committed to adhering to the best practice of operating a least privileges environment and Viewfinity allows us to do this without disrupting user productivity. We ran our environment in audit mode for the first 30 days using the Viewfinity Privilege Management solution and it identified applications in use and other tasks requiring administrative privileges that we weren’t aware of. This allowed us to proactively establish policies to take care of user needs right away. Policies and permissions are now controlled from a centralized standpoint, which has eliminated the high volume of support calls. Viewfinity allows us to go in and remove privileges en mass because we were able to pre-define policies to fit actual user needs based on applications and tasks needing admin rights. We are now much more efficient in dealing with these previously troublesome areas. Viewfinity Privilege Management does what it is intended to do: strips privileges but allows for a flexible way to manage them. Rolling out Viewfinity helped Movado Group to control unproductive downtime and predict potential problem areas.
The Results
“Realistically, Viewfinity Privilege Management does what it says it will do and strips privileges but allows for a flexible way to manage them,” said Steve. “Rolling out Viewfinity helped to control unproductive downtime and predict potential problem areas.”
Steve Welgoss
Desktop Services Manager
The savings on time and cost is unquestionable. The significant decline in IT support calls speaks volumes on its own. Within a month of rolling out Viewfinity, there has been a complete eradication of nuisance calls. In the two major primary sites in the US, there are about 250 employees at each and two IT help desk employees. The ratio is about 100:1, and to be able to eliminate the nuisance calls has a big impact on the overall productivity of the Movado workforce.
“The realization as a whole is that the investment in Viewfinity Privilege Management will pay for itself in areas of our company following best practices and automating compliance regulations. The benefits have been realized by both our end users and IT staff. When they were all local administrators, it was a catch 22. They needed some ability to be self-reliant to handle issues, like printer installs and java updates, but by providing wide-spread administrative rights, if IT was not paying attention, end users would install the Google toolbar and other troublesome applications and add-ons.
With Viewfinity Privilege Management, end users can still run updates and install printers but the system is streamlined and controlled from the backend. We allow them to do things they need to do, but block the activities known to lead to problems. Our end users don’t necessarily know why it’s running better, but they are happy it is, and they still maintain the independence and control they require being in a regional office.”